Re: Emacs vs GPS vs Eclipse, Ada vs Lisp vs Lua vs Java

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:

> On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 04:12:40 -0500, Stephen Leake wrote:
>
>> Last I checked, GPS doesn't do VHDL, LaTeX, Maxima, Matlab, bash mode,
>> make mode, monotone, read/send mail; all tools I need in my integrated
>> development environment.
>
> What about retouching private album photos and ripping CDs?

No, I don't expect Emacs to do that. But I wouldn't be surprised if
there is a mode that does!

Are you saying GPS supports that?

>> If GPS can do dynamically loaded Ada with source-code debugging, that
>> would be a huge selling point.
> [...]
>> Apparently Java is used this way in Eclipse; does that have source-code
>> debugging for dynamically loaded subprograms?
>
> You can start GPS in a command mode listening for connections from the
> program being debugged and navigate the project sources from there. (It is
> a huge help when debugging GtkAda applications.) You can walk the call
> stack from an exception handler or at any point you wanted, without messing
> up with gdb (which does not work anyway).

I gather you are saying you can use one GPS instance to debug the Ada
code in another GPS instance. That makes sense; in this mode, GPS is a
front-end for gdb. Emacs can do the same thing.

That would be the equivalent of the Emacs interactive lisp debugger.

But I have debugged GtkAda programs at that level, and it is not nearly
as productive (for the task of implementing simple GUIs for programmer
tools) as the Emacs environment. Mostly because the edit/compile/test
cycle for a single subprogram is much faster in the Emacs environment.

-- 
-- Stephe