Debugging LCB programs [was: What's everyone working on this month?]

[Peter TB Brett]

On 02/09/2016 10:51, Alex Tweedly wrote:

> But in the end I found the programming experience in LCB just too
> frustrating.
>
> I've been spoiled :-)  I'm used to symbolic, interactive debuggers -
> been using them pretty much continually for the last 45 years that I've
> been programming, starting with DDT and a proprietary one in the 70s, on
> to GDB in the 80s and 90s, then interpreted languages for a little
> while, before finally moving up to Revolution / Livecode.
> And after trying it for a while, I'm just not willing to go back to the
> dark ages and program in LCB without a decent toolset that provides
> really effective diagnostics and debugging features.

Hey Alex,

I agree with you!  It would be great to have a good debugger for LCB. 
Unfortunately, due to the way that LCB works, it would need to be an 
out-of-process debugger, and this is a lot of work that I've not yet had 
the time to poke at.

My current idea (that I've not yet had time to poke at) is to write a 
GDB extension in Guile Scheme that can print LCB stack frames 
interleaved with C/C++ stack frames.

There's some documentation here:

https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Guile.html#Guile

And there's an example for V8 here:

https://wingolog.org/pub/d8-gdb.scm (warning: moderately terrifying)

                                         Peter

-- 
Dr Peter Brett <peter.brett at livecode.com>
LiveCode Technical Project Manager

lcb-mode for Emacs: https://github.com/peter-b/lcb-mode