Re: tlug: programming

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Darren Cook <darren@example.com> wrote,

> >Doesn't make an difference, I would say.  Linux generally is 
> >perfect for software development, as you have tons of
> >tools.  (Not very surprising, I guess, as it was written by
> >software people to suit themselves.)
> 
> Has anyone tried out any of the the recent IDE's that have come out? I'm
> particularly interested in comparisons with Visual C++; especially the
> debugger.

Sorry, can't help here.  I am too much a hardcore Emacs +
command line hacker ;-) I can't stand having to touch the
mouse during programming (too slow...I probably would have
done ten key strokes before my hand would even touch the
mouse) - ok, I know that's a dangerous topic...no offense
intended...

Or as, I believe, esr once said, Emacs is my IDE :-)

So let's talk about gdb, the standard open source debugger - 
sorry, Richard, I meant to say, the standard free software
debugger. 

> Some notable features of the VC debugger are: moving the mouse over a
> variable brings a popup with it's value; 

Don't know whether any of the GUI fronts to gdb can do
something like that (see above).

> auto-display of the variables that
> you are most likely to be interested in (and hilighting those that have
> changed since the last step); 

You can tell gdb to do some actions after each command (eg,
printing variables).

> from a drop-down box being able to jump
> around the callstack, 

Sure you can do that in gdb - and you don't even have to
click on any drop-down boxes.  A simple `frame N' takes you
to the Nth stack frame.

> and not just see the source but examine variables
> (again just by moving the mouse over them). 

Sure, when you are in a stack frame, then your context is
that frame.

> And my wishlist feature is to
> be able to set a breakpoint in a recursive function that *won't* catch on
> deeper recursive calls.

In gdb each break point can have a condition.  You can set
the condition to trigger the breack point only when you are
in certain levels of the recursion.  There is also something 
called watchpoints, which allows for even more sophisticated 
conditions for stopping program execution.

Gdb is a supercool piece of software and I doubt that there
are many debuggers out there that can match it.  Is the VC
debugger able to attach to a running process and start
debugging it?  (If you think, this is a useless feature, you
have never debugged a multi-process distributed
application.)  Actually, I usually don't use gdb from the
command line, but use its Emacs mode, which is the thing to
do if you use Emacs as your IDE - saves key strokes.

There is a GUI front-end to gdb called ddd, which is at
least included in some Linux distributions, and which I
heard is quite neat.

And if, after all, there still is a feature that you would
like gdb to have - hey - just add it :-)

Cheers,

Manuel
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