Re:GDB Frontend with C Pointer Visualization
by mistrial9 on Monday February 17, 2020 @09:28AM
(#22347894)
curious - the Sun developers I saw in the late 90s had a multi-window debugger but the local variables Did Not Update, and had to be 'refreshed' manually; at the same time, I had MetrwoWerks IDE Debugger on a Macintosh, and easily had all locals, source code, stack, RAM inspection by structure and more, all updating with every change. The Sun devs were being PAID a LOT more, yet their tools looked primitive and the contextual knowledge to use them was much greater..
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Re:GDB Frontend with C Pointer Visualization
by lokedhs on Monday February 17, 2020 @11:18AM
(#22348705)
I'm not sure. I wasn't working as a kernel developer. I did have to debug stuff though to find bugs or explain certain behaviours.
I guess one reason it wasn't used much is because it was a hassle to set up, and I think it got a bit slow when you had a lot of information displayed. I do recall not using this setup much in practice, as just breaking into the debugger on the machine itself was faster and easier.
You had to lot of options when it came to working on the Solaris kernel, and the code was so easy to understand. In fact, I believe the Solaris code base is the best C code I've ever worked with. It's a pity what happened after Oracle took over.