murf@caeco.UUCP (Steve Murphy) (11/15/87)
I never really paid any attention to gdb. I just never really thought
to look it over. It comes with gnu emacs as a subdir, and is poorly advertised
by FSF. Without looking at it, I thought: eh, just a kludge most likely. Why
bother with it? The most said about in the install stuff is that you could
use it to debug gnu if the native debugger couldn't handle the size of
gnu emacs.
Well, desperate people do desperate things. Dbx as implemented by sun is neat,
but it gets lost, lies, crashes, and is a real pain at times. I was spending
so much time trying to get around dbx problems at one point that I sat back
and mused, there must be a better way. And gdb came to mind. I compiled it,
ran the on-line documentation, and dived back into debugging my program. None
of the weirdness that dbx exhibited. I found the bug quickly, with no crashes,
no aberrations, no problems. Then I TeX'd the manual and read it. WOW!
NICE! IMPRESSIVE! ELEGANT! NEAT!
Zoom thru linked lists. It'll search your PATH for the executable, if need
be. Only one thing it doesn't seem to be able to do that dbx can (at least on
Suns) --- attach to already running processes. But... there's a bunch of
nice features DBX doesn't have that GDB does.
Well, just thought I'd give something neat a plug.
Thanks for your attention.
--
Steve Murphy, CAECO, Inc., 7090 South Union Park Avenue,
Suite 200, Midvale, UT 84047
(801)255-8880
<WORLD>!{byuadam,utah-cs,nrc-ut,wicat}!caeco!murf