[Lazarus] GDB is not good, any tricks to improve it?

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2016-05-26 09:40, Tony Whyman wrote:
> Are you using Windows or Linux (or OSX)?
or FreeBSD or Solaris or AIX or RaspberryPi or GameBoy or OS/2 or DOS or
Android or WinCE or Arm Embedded or Haiku or ReactOS or ....  ;-)


> Windows anti-virus software will often get in the way as well as it 
> being generally slower.

Why are you running anti-virus software on a development machine in the
first place? That’s been a known fact in all companies I’ve worked for -
don’t do it. Thinking about it, I haven’t run any anti-virus software
for over 10 years.


> I take Graeme's point about GDB not being that great for Pascal, but it 
> does work most of the time and adding a few well placed "writeln" 

And that shows exactly the sad state that we as Free Pascal developers
live in. We have to resort to writeln() statements, temporary debug
variables and use 3rd party logging software. And we have done it for so
long, we believe that to be the norm!! Hell, even Haiku, which is a
small niche OS has a fantastic debugger that puts anything GDB+Pascal to
shame. Use YouTube and search for some debugging tutorials using
QtCreator, Intellij IDEA or Eclipse. Hell, even Delphi can be added to
that list. They all show how debuggers could and should work. None of
the show using writeln() statements.

Make no mistake, it’s not Lazarus or MSEide that is to blame. They both
try and use GDB (with tons of work-arounds and hacks) to get something
usable. Bottom line is, Pascal is a distant thought in the minds of GDB
developers - that is not likely to change any time soon.


Regards,
  Graeme

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp