tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (03/08/84)
Another feature that is desperately needed in C debuggers is an easy way to follow linked data in the memory of a process. By linked data I mean such data structures as parse trees, linked lists, etc. This extracting pointer addresses, writing them down, and typing them in stuff is for the birds; it often takes an excruciatingly long time to look over the nodes of a simple parse tree by this means. Better display of structs is also much-needed. The debuggers I've used force you to pull things out a member at a time, a very slow process when you need to look at several members for a number of structs. -- Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill mcnc!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA) All opinions expressed herein are completely my own, so don't go assuming that anyone else at UNC feels the same way.
msc@qubix.UUCP (Mark Callow) (03/12/84)
> Personnally I can understand why the Fortran compiler is an > embarrasement, considering the attitude in this community > toward Fortran. However, I cannot understand why Unix does not > come with a super-optimizing C compiler, as any increase in the > speed of the code produced will speed up all of Unix. Surely > by now better could be done. > -- > Bill Sebok Princeton University, Astrophysics Hear Hear! I have also never been able to understand why Unix, this wonderful, spiffy, marvellous, programmer friendly software development system (:-)) has such AWFUL debuggers. Perhaps people enjoy putting printf's in their programs. Some light may be beginning to dawn. I recently had an enjoyable and successful time using dbx to debug the talk program. It works very well. Unfortunately rumour has it that no more work is being done on dbx at Berkeley. One of the items in a "to do" list that came with dbx was a screen oriented interface. That, if done right, would be a major plus as it could eliminate a lot of the typing that seems an inevitable part of source level debuggers. One problem that dbx doesn't address and for which help sorely needed is debugging applications running in multiple processes or across multiple machines. Even the simple act of giving the core files unique names would help here. -- From the Tardis of Mark Callow msc@qubix.UUCP, decwrl!qubix!msc@Berkeley.ARPA ...{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!qubix!msc, ...{ittvax,amd70}!qubix!msc