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    Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux

    (github.com)
    376 points turrini | 22 comments | 15 Nov 24 12:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.665s | source | bottom
    1. mech422 ◴[15 Nov 24 12:53 UTC] No.42146468[source]▶
    oh nice - reminds me of DDD(1) DDD was like magic first time I saw it. Oh wow - DDD is still maintained ?? :-D

    1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Display_Debugger

    2 https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/

    replies(9): >>42146504 #>>42146873 #>>42147437 #>>42147656 #>>42147730 #>>42147888 #>>42149120 #>>42149837 #>>42157075 #
    2. j1elo ◴[15 Nov 24 13:00 UTC] No.42146504[source]▶
    DDD was taught to me when in University, 20 years ago, and it already felt clunky, my views are now much more moderate but Motif still feels like an eyesore.

    Conversations over the years have shown me that DDD was a great inverse marketing tool, ironically pushing developers towards the embedded debugger UI in their favorite IDEs... despite DDD itself being indeed very powerful. But even "usefulness over aesthetics" has its limits!

    replies(4): >>42146664 #>>42146891 #>>42147301 #>>42147421 #
    3. donaldihunter ◴[15 Nov 24 13:20 UTC] No.42146664[source]▶
    Yeah, I remember DDD being an incredible tool back in the day, but it was clunky even when it was new (1995).

    https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/manual/pdf/ddd-paper.pdf

    4. bitwize ◴[15 Nov 24 13:46 UTC] No.42146873[source]▶
    And it still uses Motif! Awesome!
    5. synergy20 ◴[15 Nov 24 13:48 UTC] No.42146891[source]▶
    motif does not work well with high resolution display, sadly
    replies(2): >>42147293 #>>42149716 #
    6. anthk ◴[15 Nov 24 14:35 UTC] No.42147293{3}[source]▶
    Motif today supportṡ TTF and for the HD issues, you can the DPI option for X11 at ~/.Xdefaults
    7. anthk ◴[15 Nov 24 14:37 UTC] No.42147301[source]▶
    Current DDD under the updated OpenMotif with TTF fonts can look much better than it did in the 90's and 00's, miles ahead than LessTif/former propietary Motif. It blends perfectly with EMWM where I have Liberation Sans/Mono for almost everything.
    8. dirkf ◴[15 Nov 24 14:52 UTC] No.42147421[source]▶
    There's one DDD feature that I haven't found elsewhere: its graphical representation of a struct and its contents. You can double-click on a pointer field and then it draws whatever that field pointed to, with a nice arrow connecting the two.

    I've found it a very powerful yet compact way to visualize the state of a program when debugging.

    replies(2): >>42147735 #>>42151006 #
    9. mark_undoio ◴[15 Nov 24 14:54 UTC] No.42147437[source]▶
    I love that DDD has a variety of graphical visualisations built in. I always thought the ability to data structures was particularly cool.

    A while ago there was a project to port it to GTK3 but I think that went away. I'm glad the mainline project is still going.

    replies(1): >>42147613 #
    10. mech422 ◴[15 Nov 24 15:13 UTC] No.42147613[source]▶
    yeah - the 'data display' part was the real killer feature :-)
    11. jandrese ◴[15 Nov 24 15:18 UTC] No.42147656[source]▶
    I always liked the concept with DDD, but I could never keep it from crashing more than the program I was trying to fix.
    replies(1): >>42147834 #
    12. begriffs ◴[15 Nov 24 15:25 UTC] No.42147730[source]▶
    > DDD is still maintained?

    Absolutely. I wrote about its features here https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html

    Since the article was written, the maintainers fixed the issues I pointed out. No need for many of those workarounds now. Versions 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 are substantial.

    replies(1): >>42149607 #
    13. jlintz ◴[15 Nov 24 15:26 UTC] No.42147735{3}[source]▶
    yes! this was so great in college to learn pointers and visualize linked lists
    14. ta988 ◴[15 Nov 24 15:36 UTC] No.42147834[source]▶
    It is much better now.
    15. anonymousiam ◴[15 Nov 24 15:43 UTC] No.42147888[source]▶
    DDD is great. I still use it, but I am a fossil. I sought out DDD when I was looking for something similar to dbxtool, which I used on the early Sun Microsystems machines. Folks today are spoiled with things such as Source Level Debugging.
    16. ◴[15 Nov 24 17:44 UTC] No.42149120[source]▶
    17. canucker2016 ◴[15 Nov 24 18:38 UTC] No.42149607[source]▶
    Is there any URL that lists what's new in v3.4.0 and v3.4.1?

    The DDD website ( https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ ) points to the source tar.gz and the full manual, but nothing that says "What's New" in recent versions.

    replies(1): >>42151688 #
    18. hulitu ◴[15 Nov 24 18:51 UTC] No.42149716{3}[source]▶
    Citation needed. I use Motif programs without issues on high resolution displays.
    19. slashdave ◴[15 Nov 24 19:05 UTC] No.42149837[source]▶
    Coming from VMS at the time, I was confused why there was no decent full screen interface to gdb. DDD was such a disappointment in this regard.
    20. malkia ◴[15 Nov 24 21:03 UTC] No.42151006{3}[source]▶
    Reminds of SmallTalk / and Lisp's - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager

    There was even a story, that (at least for Common Lisp), you can start from almost blank state, but have an exception handler installed (that can continue), so as you go you live-edit and add pieces missing, or if code crashes change.

    This is all good, until nowadays, where you really want to know what's deployed in production, and not just the last stuff I've live fixed.

    I mean, I guess both have values tbh, but hard to pull two models like this and use... bit like - debugger or printf statements (or both!)

    21. JNRowe ◴[15 Nov 24 22:03 UTC] No.42151688{3}[source]▶
    Might not be as direct as you'd like, but all well managed¹ GNU projects ship a NEWS file in their tarball. In this case you can also read it from savannah² without fetching the tarball.

    ¹ https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#NEWS-File

    ² https://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/ddd/trunk/doc/NEWS?view=...

    22. Jach ◴[16 Nov 24 16:11 UTC] No.42157075[source]▶
    For me it reminds me of Insight, which was my favorite GDB front-end and worked great on Windows back in the cygwin era. Unfortunately it's definitely no longer maintained. https://sourceware.org/insight/screenshots.php (Well, I guess someone did rescue it to put it on github and do some work: https://github.com/antony-jr/insight )