On 14 July 2014 15:58, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d-announce < [email protected]> wrote:
> On 14 July 2014 06:19, Manu via Digitalmars-d-announce > <[email protected]> wrote: > > I finally watched it (I failed to survive the long over-nighters until > 10am > > to watch this one live >_<). > > > > I want to offer congratulation and thanks to Iain for this work! > > For me, this is perhaps the single most important work in the D ecosystem > > yet this year, and for me, I think the debugging environment remains the > > single most significant hurdle to confident and practical adoption of D > in > > industry. > > > > Thanks Manu. I guess I'll be having trouble finding the next most > important work in the D ecosystem next year. ;) > I think you've probably earned a break ;) > It brings me to the interesting realisation (which I already knew, I have > > just been denying), that for D to proceed on Windows, MSVC will have to > > go... and I don't know how to go about this :/ > > MS's debugger will presumably never support these features, but the de > facto > > Windows toolchain emit's PDB for use with the MS tools. I wonder if there > > are competing debuggers that support PDB which could support unofficial > > extensions to PDB which may express D better? > > > > Zerobugs was aimed at D users back when it was a commercial product. > It has since been released under a boost licensed for a couple years > now, but has into gone into obscurity (I think?). > > Link: http://zerobugs.codeplex.com > Couple of clones on github too: https://github.com/search?q=zerobugs > > Being written against GTK, it's UI should be cross-platform to > Windows, so it *could* be a good base project to start from, then > build Windows debugging support into it. Someone else will need to do > initial reviewing and triaging of this stuff (we need a new > Lieutenant!) > On the back of your work, what advantage would that debugger have over established and more refined tools? What would a 'D debugger' have to offer when the debug backend understands D internally, and can even handle D expression evaluation? There are alternative tools available for windows too, but I think the key for Windows developers remains proper integration into Visual Studio, and PDB support. I guess the biggest hurdle there is integrating D concepts info into MS's proprietary PDB format. Expressing debug info like C really won't get us the full mile. Rainer bundles Mago with VisualD. I wonder what that's doing lately...
