4 ms·

I noticed the same person has made seemingly very powerful gdb-inspired debuggers for a whole bunch of languages, which is really impressive. I'm not super comf

I noticed the same person has made seemingly very powerful gdb-inspired debuggers for a whole bunch of languages, which is really impressive. I'm not super comfortable with gdb (it's been years since I used it with any regularity), in general, but I'd be willing to invest more time in it knowing the knowledge transfers to other languages.

linsomniac 9y ago
There are tons of front-ends that interface with gdb, which is part of why so many things use a gdb-like UI. One of the demos on the page is using "ddd" (the Data Display Debugger), which I was pretty impressed with 20 years ago when I last used it.
rurban 9y ago
bashdb being the most popular one by Rocky. The others unfortunately never really took off.
- rockybernstein 9y ago
  Yeah, you win a few and lose a lot. I guess it all evens out. Judging by github ratings, the debugger for zsh (zshdb) is more popular than I would have expected. And that means I have had to know more about zsh than I would have otherwise. Like bashdb, zshdb is packaged in Debian/Ubuntu; recently the debian maintainer asked me to update this for more recent zsh releases, which I've done. By the way, I use github ratings to decide which of several projects to work on when there is a choice. remake ratings have shot up quite a bit by this post, so I guess I'll have to beef it up: add a screenshot of profiling and update the older versions of GNU make for more recent changes. My recent focus has been on using decompilation as a means of getting more accurate position information. See https://github.com/rocky/python-uncompyle6/wiki/Deparsing-Paper https://github.com/rocky/python-uncompyle6/wiki/Deparsing-Pa... Sure, I use this in my debuggers, but it would be probably as or more valuable in tracebacks. For example there is a decent decompiler in Perl for example: https://metacpan.org/pod/B::DeparseTree https://metacpan.org/pod/B::DeparseTree . I would love to figure out how to hook into Perl's traceback (not Carp, but the one for Perl) to augment that to give this more accurate position information.
  - rurban 9y ago
    You are speaking with the Perl expert :) glad to help. Positions are stored in COP's only, you need to get them dynamically via the API. Some blocks do have wrong or bad line ranges, yes.
    - rockybernstein 9y ago
      I know. I am a long-time fan of your Perl work. And I know how to get them dynamically via an API which is done for example in https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Trepan::Deparse https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Trepan::Deparse What I don't know how to do, if you could help is register in Perl that I want my routine called when Perl hits an error, so that I can do the deparse and spit out a more detailed location message. Thanks!

linsomniac 9y ago

There are tons of front-ends that interface with gdb, which is part of why so many things use a gdb-like UI. One of the demos on the page is using "ddd" (the Data Display Debugger), which I was pretty impressed with 20 years ago when I last used it.

rurban 9y ago

bashdb being the most popular one by Rocky. The others unfortunately never really took off.

rockybernstein 9y ago
Yeah, you win a few and lose a lot. I guess it all evens out. Judging by github ratings, the debugger for zsh (zshdb) is more popular than I would have expected. And that means I have had to know more about zsh than I would have otherwise. Like bashdb, zshdb is packaged in Debian/Ubuntu; recently the debian maintainer asked me to update this for more recent zsh releases, which I've done. By the way, I use github ratings to decide which of several projects to work on when there is a choice. remake ratings have shot up quite a bit by this post, so I guess I'll have to beef it up: add a screenshot of profiling and update the older versions of GNU make for more recent changes. My recent focus has been on using decompilation as a means of getting more accurate position information. See https://github.com/rocky/python-uncompyle6/wiki/Deparsing-Paper https://github.com/rocky/python-uncompyle6/wiki/Deparsing-Pa... Sure, I use this in my debuggers, but it would be probably as or more valuable in tracebacks. For example there is a decent decompiler in Perl for example: https://metacpan.org/pod/B::DeparseTree https://metacpan.org/pod/B::DeparseTree . I would love to figure out how to hook into Perl's traceback (not Carp, but the one for Perl) to augment that to give this more accurate position information.
- rurban 9y ago
  You are speaking with the Perl expert :) glad to help. Positions are stored in COP's only, you need to get them dynamically via the API. Some blocks do have wrong or bad line ranges, yes.
  - rockybernstein 9y ago
    I know. I am a long-time fan of your Perl work. And I know how to get them dynamically via an API which is done for example in https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Trepan::Deparse https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Trepan::Deparse What I don't know how to do, if you could help is register in Perl that I want my routine called when Perl hits an error, so that I can do the deparse and spit out a more detailed location message. Thanks!