DDD, best debugger

[sans-hubris]

Why don't people use this debugger more often? (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/)

I swear, it's the best debugger I've ever used. What other debuggers let you display a tree like they were meant to be displayed? How about doing plots and graphs like it can do?

Plus, what other debugger can debug as many languages as DDD?

[EscapeCharacter]

ddd is awesome id use it more if i programmed in x more(mostly code of ssh though)

[sans-hubris]

Originally posted by EscapeCharacter
ddd is awesome id use it more if i programmed in x more(mostly code of ssh though) That's what X forwarding is for.

Err, rather tunneling through ssh.

[Strike]

DDD isn't quite perfect, really. It's good, but it's also slow and, iirc, a bit of a memory hog. Don't get me wrong, when a simple gdb session won't help me, DDD does the job up right.

One of the downsides of DDD is that since it's mostly a wrapper around gdb, you kinda have to learn gdb to use it really well (though you can use DDD with zero gdb knowledge, just not as well). But, once you learn gdb just fine, you generally don't really need DDD for most things.

[sans-hubris]

Originally posted by Strike
DDD isn't quite perfect, really. It's good, but it's also slow and, iirc, a bit of a memory hog. Don't get me wrong, when a simple gdb session won't help me, DDD does the job up right.

One of the downsides of DDD is that since it's mostly a wrapper around gdb, you kinda have to learn gdb to use it really well (though you can use DDD with zero gdb knowledge, just not as well). But, once you learn gdb just fine, you generally don't really need DDD for most things. Well, I don't know about you, but I actually learnt a lot about how to use gdb by using ddd.

[GnuVince]

DDD doesn't support the languages I know. So I do my debugging with a top-level loop and it works quite well anyway.

[Strike]

Originally posted by sans-hubris
Well, I don't know about you, but I actually learnt a lot about how to use gdb by using ddd.
Well yes, it is a reciprocal relationship, but then once you learn the stuff for gdb in DDD, you can just use gdb to do it and it is orders of magnitude faster to just do it in gdb.

[sans-hubris]

Originally posted by Strike
Well yes, it is a reciprocal relationship, but then once you learn the stuff for gdb in DDD, you can just use gdb to do it and it is orders of magnitude faster to just do it in gdb. Ah, but you can't do graphical displays of pointers in plain gdb. In gdb, if you have some sort of tree (e.g. a binary tree or 2-3-4 tree), you can actually display all the objects in the tree in a manner that actually looks like a tree.

Or even if you think about something as simple as a link-list. (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/all.jpg)

You can even do plots and graphs of various variables within your program.

[Strike]

Yeah, dealing with dereferencing pointers is about all I use DDD for over gdb. That's not a whole lot :)