Debugging on Linux sucks. Let’s try to make it suck a little less.

I was debugging a bug in Ogre, and after giving up with Linux, in MSVC the issues came up almost instantly after looking at this screenshot (note the bug has been fixed in this shot):

With a single mouse hover I was looking at 48 numbers at once. Of course this may not seem useful if you don’t know how to read it, but if you do; numbers that are out of place will appear in no time. For example this picture is telling me that except for object 0, objects 1, 2 & 3 have null matrices. So unless there is just one object, derivedTransform.makeTransform didn’t work correctly.

By the way, Object 0 is at position (0, 51.59, -0.0159), unit scale, no rotation. One picture, so much information.

In Linux, every GUI show these numbers in a pretty useless way. There’s no way I can visualize them all at once or retain enough information to imagine what’s going on.

How am I supposed to quickly look at that?

But then I was introduced to GDB pretty printers, which unfortunately, the manual is very bad.

Trying out pretty printers.

The situation is pretty lame. Every GUI treats the output format differently and there is no standarization in how the data is displayed.

1. Qt Creator ignores them (it uses their own interface called “data dumpers”), but they will show up if you type “print derivedTransform” in the Debugger Log (which is hidden by default, go to Windows->Debugger Log). I actually can live with that, but if you use the “right way” of outputting the pretty printers, the format is extremely verbose to the point it’s useless. Fortunately I found a workaround.
2. KDevelop works almost like intended. If I use the py interface ‘to_string’ it shows up nicely and exactly as I want, but there is no way to hide it when you don’t need it. ArrayMatrix4 can take a lot of space. If I print using the ‘children’ interface (one for each) then KDevelop starts ignoring the to_string method, and starts hiding the important data again.
3. Eclipse and Nemiver don’t respect end of lines. They show the escape character instead. i.e. “Data[0]\nData[1]”. Ugly. That rules out the ‘to_string’ interface. Using the ‘children’ interface works, but starts having the same problem as KDevelop (the relevant data is hidden behind too many children in the hierarchy)
4. Additionally, Eclipse said the inl files couldn’t be loaded (showed up assembly instead) even though the path it claimed it was looking for was correct.
5. Console GDB debugging is the only place where I could fully control how the data is displayed, but then I loose all other goodies needed to productively spot issues. It’s a very bad sign when using the command line is several times superior to using an IDE.
6. Code Blocks… ugh, it’s not even…. I mean… what kind of debugger doesn’t allow launching debugging sessions from a foreign application? Why do I have to attach, and why do I have to magically know the pid of my process (which I have to put to sleep and act fast). Even after managing to do that, the debug display was plain disappointing. Also where are the hotkeys for single stepping? My god.
7. KDevelop & Qt Creator were much more forgiving to honest mistakes in the embedded source file paths compared to Eclipse, Nemiver and Code Blocks (I just want to debug the damn code and continue coding, not spend my time setting up paths “the correct” way).

KDevelop worked

KDevelop along with Qt Creator were the best debuggers (considering other issues I’m not mentioning).

When it comes to pretty printing, like I said, using to_string interface in KDevelop worked almost exactly as I wanted, so here’s my pretty printing interface. Copy-paste the content into the .gdbinit file in your home folder and it should work.

Note that pointers won’t work. If you’ve got a pointer, you have to dereference it, i.e. add “*mPosition” to the watched variables, instead of “mPosition”

The output takes a lot of space, but it’s very nice and clear. May be even better than MSVC (though KDevelop still has many flaws in other areas)

Qt Creator worked

Forget about pretty printing in the “locals and variables” window you won’t get that, and refer to the Debugger Log window. Type ‘print derivedTransform’ (no quotes) and it will work. I’m used to this since the watch window in MSVC often requires me to type these kind of things.

I had to use a special version of the children interface that all other IDEs interpret as char* (which makes them ugly to display) but it’s the only way I found to get decent output in Qt (the Debugger Log also shows escape characters instead of obeying them, and they surround every line in quotes, and use excessive lines for each expression).

Look at the Debugger Log, also pretty formatting. It was a PITA to get it to work.

Copy paste the content of this file into both “Additional Startup Commands” and “Additional Attach Commands”; which is awesome, because I can use Qt Creator’s pretty printing along with the other IDEs having a different pretty printer config. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a screenshot:

Nemiver and Eclipse

Although they sucked hard, what worked “best” (which is still pretty bad) is the “strictly correct” children interface. Since someone might still find it useful, here it goes. Copy-paste the content into the .gdbinit file in your home folder and it should work. You may need to destroy and recreate your debugging project in Eclipse for changes to take effect.

Download section

I’ve wrapped them all in one tar.bz2 file. It’s under GPL3 license. DOWNLOAD LINK.

What’s next?

I’m going to stick with Qt Creator since it’s the most intuitive, while switching to KDevelop every now and then if it needs to. It’s bad that no debugging IDE I tried satisfied me. They work well for trivial stuff like watching the contents of an int, an array, or an std::vector. But once you go past that and need to debug complex data, there’s an obscene amount of effort you need to do compared with MSVC which just throws you exactly what you need to look at; and this complexity distracts you from the problem you’re trying to solve.

I don’t like the fact that I need three different gdbinit files for each IDE, because they don’t follow any sane convention.

If you dare to say that “true programmers don’t need to debug”, then grow up, learning from our mistakes is a part of our growth, and in my relatively short life I’ve been as far as debugging the compiler to spot it producing bad SIMD code. So, STFU.