[fpc-devel] In FPC written FPC Debugger

[Johann Glaser]

Hi!

On Fre, 2008-02-22 at 09:20 +0100, Michael Schnell wrote:
> > Lack of Pascal support like with, local procedures, widestrings, 
> > dynamic arrays, properties is platform independend. Therefore all 
> > platforms would benefit.
> >
> Are these things depending on the internal structures of GDB part and 
> informations for the executables that is needed to be used under a GIU 
> like Lazarus <or Eclipse> ) or is it just a shortcoming of the command 
> line user interface of GDB ?
> 
> Would it not be more appropriate to enhance GDB itself instead of 
> setting up a completely new project. This seems to be a lot less work 
> that "reinventing the wheel". I feel that Delphi language is not the 
> only language that offers features like or similar to "local procedures, 
> widestrings, dynamic arrays, properties". So this effort should be 
> supported by the "powers " of GDB.

I want to second that. GDB also lacks some features very useful for C++
programmers (yes, I have to use it):
 - Display STL types (e.g. std::string, std::vector, std::map). These
   are the "usual" way of making strings and containers in C++ and are
   quite complex internally. GDB displays this internal structure of
   these types instead of beautifying it according to its semantics. For
   the containers it's even impossible to view its elements.
 - Set breakpoints within template functions. A template function might
   be instantiated multiple times, i.e. for every type it is used for.
   If you set a breakpoint at the source line within a template
   function, only one instantiation is (randomly?) chosen.
Hmm, these rather like a GDB wish list bug report looking items point
out that GDB doesn't even intensively care about C++ (despite it
supports name (de-)mangling).

Besides the mentioned points, I really dissuade from starting with a
completely new debugger project, since there is so many basic work to
implement and to care for and then to support. The FPC community is IMHO
still too small for such a project. And GDB still lacks a lot of
improvements.

Bye
  Hansi