GUI Debugger

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Wednesday, July 27, 2005 1:02 PM +0200 Tarjei Knapstad 
<tarjei.knapstad at predichem.com> wrote:

> If you mean a window of watched variables and their current value, then
> yes, KDevelop has this too :)

Sort of. The Windows-hosted debuggers I'm familiar with (including 
DOS-hosted Borland Turbo Debug from 20 years ago) have two windows, watch 
and local. Watch includes a custom list of variables. Locals includes stuff 
in the current stack frame. Smarter debuggers can also walk the stack to 
display locals for different frames. There's a call stack window where one 
can select the frame of interest. This is very useful for answering "how 
did I get here?". A tree view of structures and arrays is another essential 
feature.

BTW, while discussing debuggers, do any of the high-end x86 family include 
the branch trace features commonly found in embedded processors? This is 
another handy way of figuring out how one got into a surprising section of 
code. Each branch is logged to special on-chip memory and the debugger uses 
this to reconstruct the sequence of instructions used to get to the current 
point. Before chips got really fast, this usually required an external ICE, 
but now with most code executing in internal cache, it's impossible to see 
what's happening from outside the chip. And because full trace is expensive 
in terms of chip real estate, only the branches are stored on-chip.