Thank you for the encouragement, John. For me the main lesson was that it's actually rather easy to customize GDB to fit AmForth's execution model even though GDB in its default setup can feel rather useless. It's too bad that it doesn't seem to be possible to customize GDB's understanding of the call stack, so I don't see how we could make GDB's `backtrace` useful, which is a pity since it is a fairly central concept for the tool. Fortunately we can just work around it and get most of what we need it seems.
One more thing that I want to explore is what I've seen in the cortex-debug extension for vscode (https://github.com/Marus/cortex-debug), which is what Arduino IDE seems to be relying on for its debugging support. Beyond what we've discussed already it can also show the state of the various peripheral registers, which can also be quite handy when working on a particular problem. Adding one more view showing a set of selected registers of interest should be quite simple as well. I'm definitely going to do that when I start working on the serial connection to the computer. Anyway, I'm also confident we can easily adjust this for any other core types that people might be working on. I'd be happy to help if anyone is interested. In my experience time spent improving your tools can pay back many times over if it saves a bit of time and effort every step of the way. Given how important a minute detail can be, being able to see it easily at the right moment can mean the difference between solving the problem and spending days banging your head against it. Cheers, Martin On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 9:59 AM John Sarabacha <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Martin, > This is quite good, also your enjoying what you are doing I think that is > the key for good quality products (software, hardware, integrated systems). > This is a time saver for new development and making it work properly. This > gives you more control of the debugging process for the chip your > interested in. This also beats what MounStudio has done with it's > integration of GDB for debugging their CH32 chips because they focus only > on those chips. > > Have a good holiday > John S > PS: I don't think you need to worry about the quantity of emails, looks > like we can break the record of the number of emails in one month at least > since 2014? (in the group email chart). > _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel
