debugger blues

[cy via Digitalmars-d]

I've been working for 3 days straight on this: the monumental 
task of taking these text files and turning them into HTML. Or 
should I say, FML, because FML. Why is this so hard?

My code is peppered with writelns and sanity checks, none of 
which show anything alarming until long after the document gets a 
self referential cycle in it, and apparantly this is happening by 
"creating a child and appending it to a node." Obviously that's a 
rare and obscure operation, that nobody ever would think of doing.

I can't do any introspection. GDB just goes belly up with DIE 
errors. Trying to get non-broken DWARF information by switching 
to GDC, GDC goes belly up with "internal error, please submit a 
bug report" and the reason for this error is creating a module 
named "cross.iter" and adding a sixth exported symbol to it.

In reflection, what would be really nice is:
* some way to trace function calls, to see the order of calls 
before the program died.
* a backtrace that displays when you hit ^C, instead of just 
silent death
* DWARF debugging symbols that don't scramble the only program on 
earth that actually uses them.
* some way to signal the program to dump the stack frames of its 
threads to a log
* better ways to report program status besides writeln("we got 
here somehow");
* catching null pointer errors earlier, instead of waiting until 
you 1) call the class function and 2) the function accesses a 
member.
* ways to ensure that nothing is being copied, if you 
accidentally write a wrapper that creates an object instead of 
referencing it, or moving it.
* better const support, so can minimize the amount of mutable 
data involved here
* it would be nice to be able to return an iterator whose 
elements are either const or not const, using inout, instead of 
having to write the function twice.
* it would also be nice to be able to return references, instead 
of copying structs every time, or writing wrappers around them 
(which also cannot be used with inout)
* heap allocated structs, stack allocated classes, it would be 
nice to have allocation strategy independent from layout strategy.
* less people writing complex allocating functions as their 
struct init property, and then leaving me wondering how that 
could possibly be invariant.
* a pony