[Lazarus] Conditional Debugger breakpoints not working ?

[Martin Frb]

On 20/02/2023 13:46, Michael Van Canneyt via lazarus wrote:
>
>
> I suggest you adapt the wiki to clarify all this.
>
> While you're at it, The link in the wiki page to the gdb convenience
> functions is broken.
updated

>
> In general, I don't think you can expect the user to know that he 
> should use $_streq(myvar, "hello"), specially the cmem condition that 
> seems necessary.
>
> Ideally, the IDE could detect a string and transform the expression.

This always has been the issue with gdb.

If you had a watch with anything but just a plain variable name, then 
gdb may give you:
- an error,
- or an incorrect result,
- or the correct result

For watches, there is quite a lot of code in the IDE to try and fix 
those things.
There are testcases, that can be run with different debug-info, and diff 
gdb versions. (And they run for many hours / and unfortunately still 
have some errors, some false errors...).

But there is no way to get to 100%. In many cases gdb simple does not 
give enough info to detect the necessary information on the underlaying 
type. (And when trying to get this, one has to be carefully not to crash 
gdb).
Also it makes evaluating each individual watch a lot slower (at least 
factor 3 or 4). Though on that I have always pushed the point that a 
"correct result" is worth *any* wait time.

In any case, with conditional breakpoints it would be even more complex....

It would be nice to have, but with the availability of FpDebug, it is 
very unlikely that will be fixed. (There are simply a lot of other 
things that (should) have more priority)

I may add a warning to the breakpoint dlg, that for non-fpdebug will 
display a red TLabel below the input, with some text that the condition 
may not work at all.

It is a problem on Mac, with LLDB. Though I am not even sure that 
conditional breakpoint are supported at all...
LLDB probably can do them (with restrictions like gdb). But the IDE has 
absolutely on code to translate "pascal to lldb" => because for watches 
it can evaluate with fpdebug.
But conditional breakpoints must be done by lldb, or they become very 
very slow. (That is if they need to pass lots of time before they match 
the condition, and each hit pass 1 second or more, you quickly get to 
several minutes of wait time)