Just found this project through the rust debugger survey. Looks really cool! I'm gonna drop some issues for features that I would really love to see in a modern debugger.
First things first, I don't see any support for conditional breakpoints. Debugging is a kind of scientific process, and conditional breakpoints are extremely important for hypothesis testing. A common workflow for me is
- Form hypothesis about cause of bug.
- Place breakpoint in a position that has information that can potentially falsify that hypothesis.
- Run, check to see if it is falsified, then see if there is further information at that point to refine the hypothesis.
That second point often requires specific conditions on the breakpoint to be able to hit the right point in time to falsify the hypothesis.
Conditional breakpoints normally work by executing a condition in the debugger process after the breakpoint is hit. This is quite slow, and it is possible to do better. Here is some discussion I had on reddit where a couple of ideas were presented: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1exu091/new_c_features_in_visual_studio_v1711/lj8dx3g/.
Just found this project through the rust debugger survey. Looks really cool! I'm gonna drop some issues for features that I would really love to see in a modern debugger.
First things first, I don't see any support for conditional breakpoints. Debugging is a kind of scientific process, and conditional breakpoints are extremely important for hypothesis testing. A common workflow for me is
That second point often requires specific conditions on the breakpoint to be able to hit the right point in time to falsify the hypothesis.
Conditional breakpoints normally work by executing a condition in the debugger process after the breakpoint is hit. This is quite slow, and it is possible to do better. Here is some discussion I had on reddit where a couple of ideas were presented: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1exu091/new_c_features_in_visual_studio_v1711/lj8dx3g/.