Re: Quick Question about GPS IDE

[Brad Moore <brad.moore@shaw.ca>]

On 14-12-29 02:39 AM, Stephen Leake wrote:
> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>
>> On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 23:21:20 +0100, J-P. Rosen wrote:
>>
>>> Le 28/12/2014 13:41, Dmitry A. Kazakov a écrit :
>>>> Its gdb is totally unusable in any real-life sized project. You will not be
>>>> able to initialize the program and set a break point, as simple as this.
>>> ???
>>> Debug/Initialize, then click in the left margin in front of the line
>>> where you want to set a breakpoint. Looks like simple and intuitive...
>>>
>>> Note: I rarely use debuggers in general,
>>
>> That's why you believe it would work.
>>
>>> but I can't let such an
>>> incorrect information without a rebutal...
>>
>> As I said, in a real size project you either will not be able to set the
>> breakpoint after you initialize or else it will not stop at the breakpoint.
>> Actually it will not stop anywhere. I don't know if that depends on the
>> size or on libraries used, maybe on both. Even when you could set a
>> breakpoint you not guaranteed to be able to debug the program. It can go
>> mad at any time, while stepping through etc. The fact is, it is totally
>> unusable in practice.
>
> Just for the record, I use gdb fairly often, on real projects (a NASA
> simulator, home projects), and have _never_ had these issues. I've run
> it on Lynx (a real-time OS) both natively and via the remote interface,
> on Windows, Red Hat and Debian.
>
> So it depends on the details of your project.
>

I've also used it to debug large multi-threaded distributed systems, 
both within GPS and Ada, and outside of Ada and GPS (C and C++), and 
have found it to be a useful tool. I also have not seen the issues 
mentioned. I've also used the Visual Studio debugger, and offhand 
haven't seen any significant difference between the two environments. 
There may be finer details that highlight one over the other, but if so, 
I haven't noticed them. Overall, I think they are fairly comparable. One 
nice feature of gdb that I think Visual Studio lacks is that it can also 
be used in a console window without a GUI, which I've found to be useful 
at times when debugging on an embedded platform, though gdb also 
supports remote debugging with a GUI.

So I basically disagree with the claim that it is totally unusable in 
practice.