Debugging support for D - wiki

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 23.09.2013 21:50, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> For DMD+Windows, is there only good debugger support with VisualD? :-(
> And how well does that work with 32/64 bit platform variations?

Current options that I know of for Windows:

- DMD/Win32+windbg(1996): This is a version of windbg from 1996 with 
very basic debugging support and is an embarrassment to be delivered 
with dmd.

- DMD/Win32+cv2pdb: cv2pdb allows conversion of the (often no longer 
supported) CodeView 4 debug info into pdb files and makes debugging 
available by most C/C++ debuggers. This is also used by Visual D when 
using the VS debugger. You can see a list features that work or don't 
work here: http://dsource.org/projects/cv2pdb/wiki/Features
For non-VS debuggers, most of the visualization extras for displaying 
strings, dynamic and associative arrays will not be available.

- DMD/Win32+mago: mago is a debug engine for Visual Studio explicitely 
for D. Most notably, it has watch support for D expressions whereas in 
other debuggers you usually have to know the C-representation. It can be 
used with/without Visual D, but things like the "Auto" window only work 
with language support by Visual D.

- DMD/Win64: dmd emits MS compatible debug information so that the 
appropriate PDB file is generated during linking and debugging is 
possible with most C/C++ debuggers. Debug info is not yet optimal, 
mostly because the VS debugger does not like '.' in names. (cv2pdb 
defaults to replacing it with '@').

- DMD/Win32+ddbg: ddbg is linked from the web site to 
http://ddbg.mainia.de/releases.html but this seems a dead link. Last 
time I tried ddbg some years ago it didn't work out too well for me 
(maybe it's mostly for D1).

- GDC+cv2pdb: cv2pdb is also able to convert DWARF debug information to 
PDB files. As DWARF is more complex than (documented) CodeView debug 
information, expect some more quirks than with