improving debugging experience ;)

[Richard Dale]

On Thursday 08 December 2005 23:46, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > In C#/.NET each and every little object has a common base class even
> > called object, having a virtual function called toString() making it
> > possible, that the debugger is able to use this function to pretty print
> > the output of a variable's object::ToString() instead of the raw data.
>
> I wanted to comment on that, but then I saw you know already....
>
> > Of course, in C++ you simply have no really common base class, in fact,
> > we're having several frameworks and each and everyone calls is base class
> > different, not to mention: TObject/QObject/CObject/Object/....
>
> Right, C++ is not Java (don't know C#/.NET) and thus no common base
> class and no Metaclass for information about classes...
Well just switch to ruby, and you can still carry on using KDevelop ;). There 
are ruby inspect and pretty_print methods which allow you to customise how 
instances appear in the debugger. The KDevelop ruby debugger is a combination 
of an object inspector, interactive code tester as well as a debugger. If you 
look at a QtRuby or Korundum app running you can learn quite a lot about how 
the Qt meta data is structured - it's quite educational even if you usually 
program in C++.

-- Richard