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Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux

(github.com)
376 points turrini | 3 comments | 15 Nov 24 12:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.467s | source
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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/

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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!

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1. 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.

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2. jlintz ◴[15 Nov 24 15:26 UTC] No.42147735[source]▶
yes! this was so great in college to learn pointers and visualize linked lists
3. malkia ◴[15 Nov 24 21:03 UTC] No.42151006[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!)