On Friday 16 September 2005 09:39 am, June Tate wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:27:52PM -0700, Kurt Granroth wrote:
> > And don't even TRY to compare the
> > VS debugger with gdb. gdb may be the most powerful debugger under
> > Unix, but it comes across as a "hobby" debugger compared to the VS
> > debugger. gdb is so unreliable and unintuitive to use that I will
> > nearly always prefer 'printf' style debugging under Linux rather than
> > fighting with gdb. The VS debugger is rock-solid reliable and
> > everything makes perfect sense when using it.
>
> Perhaps, but are you comparing the UI to UI experience, or the
> debugging engine? I've been using GDB for nearly a year now through
> a companion program called DDD that is bar none the best debugging
> environment I've found (even compared to VS). GDB provides extremely
> powerful and flexible debugging -- but it's default text UI really
> sucks. Try giving one of it's frontends like DDD a try -- once I did I
> never looked back.
DDD is pretty slick, I agree. I first tried it out back with version (I think
1.4) in 1996 and have used it on and off ever since. A year ago, I spent
considerable time with it in an attempt to transition some Windows developers
to Linux. In the end, though, DDD is only as strong as gdb allows it to be.
When it works, it's great ... but in my experience, that doesn't happen
nearly enough.
The core problem goes back to gdb's unreliable nature. It's notorious for not
finding methods or variables when you need them. Or not being able to query
the value of a variable. Or stepping through multi-threaded code in an
inexplicable pattern.
It's possible that if you are doing C development (or C++ development without
too many namespaces) and not using too many libraries or threads, then you
might be fine. But for the majority of development that I've had to do, it
rarely worked when I needed it to.
Still, it's worth a try. And like I said, when it does work, it's very slick!
Kurt
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