Debugging with KDevelop

Francesco Montorsi f18m_cpp217828 at yahoo.it
Sun Oct 23 21:48:03 UTC 2005


Hi,
     I'm new to this list so I hope this is the right place to discuss this issue ;)

I've just switched from MSWinXP to FC4 and since I've used MSVC6 for a lot of years I was
very happy to find a program like KDevelop with a lot of features that were missing from
MSVC6... and all of this for free ! good work !

However I have a big problem with KDevelop (3.2.0): the debugger.
I tried to use it, I read the manual, I googled but I cannot find any workaround to make
the debugger easier to use: the main function of a debugger is to inspect code and
let the developer find the bugs. Unfortunately the most powerful tool to inspect code, the
variable tree window, is much more difficult/annoying to use than, for example, MSVC6's one.


1) You cannot define any "expansion rule": I use everywhere wxString object types which
are the wxWidgets' strings. I just cannot see their contents unless I add as watch
expression: (char*)str.m_pchData, or unless I expand all the times the variable tree 
clicking on the variable until I reach the parent class and I can finally expand its 
m_pchData variable manually.
(also, when using Unicode, I cannot see string contents expanding the variables in the 
tree; probably because "wxChar" is mapped to "wchar_t" instead of "char"...).

This is a big loss of time when you have to inspect many variables. In MSVC6 there is the 
AUTOEXP.DAT file where you can define simple expansion rules. IMHO this feature would make 
the use of debugger 10/20 times faster.


2) You cannot see the return values of the functions. This is a bit problematic specially 
when the returned value is used directly in other expressions, without storing it in a 
variable...


3) To make stepping a little easier, it would be nice (but this has low priority, IMHO) to 
give to the user a way to select (maybe using regexp) the functions where he *never*
wants to step into so that if he uses Step-into over one of those functions (maybe just 
because there are a lot of them and he pressed the wrong key :-)) the debugger instead 
just does a Step-Over.


IMO these features would definitevely patch the last area where KDevelop is inferior to 
MSVC ;)
I know various programmers (in wx community specially, where we all do cross-platform 
programming) who fear to switch from Win->Linux because they are convinced that there are 
no IDEs with a debugger as powerful as MSVC's one...

I really would like to help on implementing these features. Unfortunately I've never used 
Qt and it would probably take a lot of time to me to learn...

Thanks indeed & keep up the good work,
Francesco Montorsi





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