debugger

Kabuta: GoClipse meets Delve

Gregory Golberg romana , , , , ,

I am addicted to having good development tools, specifically, I like my debuggers visual. Once I was so annoyed by inability to debug a common use case of calling a PL/SQL stored procedure from Java, I made it into a single-stack cross-language debugger project, for example.

And I’m also a fan of Eclipse (well, see above).

So when Romana went with Go (pun definitely intended) as our language of choice, I quickly found GoClipse, and it was nice.

But then I learned about Delve and I wanted to have the best of both worlds — the functionality of Delve and the graphics of GoClipse.

So here’s an idea… Eclipse (from which GoClipse is, obviously, derived) understands GDB/MI, and can represent it visually. So all that remains is to adapt Delve’s API to GDB/MI.

And so I started it as a Kabuta project. Let’s hope I don’t abandon it…

Poor Man’s Tracepoints and a call sequence of a C program

Gregory Golberg docs, tips and gists , , , , , , ,

My C is quite rusty, so to help me figure out the flow of a program, I thought I’d do with gdb what Tony Loton did with JPDA. Quickly giving myself a refresher on gdb, I thought tracepoints are the easiest way to go. Except that they are available only for
remote targets, and

  1. There’s no gdbserver on my host platform (Cygwin)
  2. The target platform does have it (good news!), but it doesn’t support tracepoints (and some say, that few if any stubs even support it…

So I wrote a silly Perl script to read ctags information, create breakpoints on every function entry, print the arguments and resume. I haven’t bothered to figure out where to use pure MI vs. CLI commands, and in general I have no clue…

Now, what I think would be interesting is making this an add-on, using CDT (or, more generically, via Eclipse Debug Framework) and GEF… I envision something like a call graph (with exclusions of course, because it will become too big), which grows as you step through, displaying arguments. Could be a quick way to get a picture of how a program works before just reading the code and keeping stuff in your head…

In related news, upgrading to Eclipse 3.2.2 I lost the “Remote debugging” launch configuration. (Ironically, the reason for the attempted upgrade was to see whether a bug with hardcoded remote port has been fixed (it appeared that it’s always 4305, no matter what you put in; while the default one is 1234, which is the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage.). Which brings me to the “Zero information content” of various blogs/articles out there (which this blog is trying not to be). Thank you, Bill Graham, for pointing out that “the ‘vanilla’ CDT from http://www.eclipse.org […] doesn’t support remote target debugging”, thus leading me in my Google search to your article which doesn’t tell me how to fix it, nor does it tell me much of anything… There, I vented. (The answer, BTW, is to get Target Management, who knew…)

Dbdb – a JPDA-based single-stack debugger for mixed-language programming

Gregory Golberg dbdb , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dbdb project is officially up for adoption, because I have no plans for working on it (I am sick of it).

Dbdb is a proof-of-concept of a JPDA-based single-stack debugger for mixed-language programming, done as an Eclipse plugin (but doesn’t have to be). It is based on Java 6 (“Mustang”). The proof-of-concept is allowing a developer to debug Java code that calls a PL/SQL stored procedure. The debugging session in Java proceeds normally, nothing to write home about. When a Statement.execute() (or similar) statement is executed, however, the debugger connects to the Oracle’s VM and shows a combined call stack, from Java down into PL/SQL. (See screenshot). The idea, of course, that it can be done with other combinations, but Java-into-Oracle-stored-proc is a very common scenario.

P.S. This is a rehash of an older post. I am trying to see what Blogger is like vs. LJ (for instance, LJ breaks javablogs feeds).

That’s it, done…

Gregory Golberg dbdb , , , , , , , , , ,

That’s it, done!

Bassem (Max) Jamaleddine

 
Prof.Madden finally approved the latest version of Dbdb write-up, and so I am all set for my 10+-years-overdue degree. With that, I’ve updated the sourceforge project
with all the latest stuff from my workspace, including the docs on the page, Javadoc, code (and aforementioned docs also) in CVS, etc (even a screenshot).
Dbdb project is officially open for adoption, because I have no plans for working on it (I am sick of it). Fly, baby, fly…
P.S.

  • I have to see whether Pat and Spencer actually decided to use this one for the IDEA Plugin Contest… There’s still time…
  • Maybe I do want to augment it for use with GWT, so it automagically inserts a debugger; statement as the first
    line any native Javascript method… Just for kicks… Nah, it would be too slow…