Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux

Slightly off topic but I think it is a good place to ask: One of the few things from windows that I miss when using linux is the debugging experience with visual studio (not code). When debugging a medium-sized C++ project on windows, the launch of the debug build is pretty fast and stepping over lines is almost instantaneous. On linux launching the executable using gdb takes like 10 seconds loading modules and stepping over each line takes like half a second which I think is intolerable (lldb is even worse). Yet I don't see people complaining about this online very much. Am I missing something? E.g. is there a compiler flag that speeds up debug launch time and step speed that I am not using?

> I don't see people complaining about this online very much

I complain about gdb all the time, speed is just one aspect. Step-by-step debugging is just terrible on Linux. Maybe that's actually the reason few people complain about it, they just don't use gdb, instead relying on other tools, especially printf(). I am not in the video game industry, but they seem to be way, way ahead of everyone else, especially Linux (non-game) developers. Maybe some collaboration is in order.

As for your specific problem, I don't know. Do you have optimization turned on when debugging? gcc/gdb and the LLVM equivalents let you debug optimized builds, but it is not ideal as knowing which instruction corresponds to which line is complicated, and maybe gdb is working extra hard for it. The "-Og" flag is supposed to only do "debugger friendly" optimizations, also "-ggdb" or "-ggdb3" is supposed to be better than plain "-g" for use with gdb.