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Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux

(github.com)
376 points turrini | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 12:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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hexomancer ◴[15 Nov 24 13:04 UTC] No.42146531[source]▶
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?
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1. jmorse3 ◴[15 Nov 24 16:04 UTC] No.42148108[source]▶
Ensure you're building with DWARF5, and enable accelerator tables like .debug_names, which will allow debuggers to receive a pre-prepared index of the symbol names in the program (and thus it doesn't have to parse all the DWARF on startup).

Slow stepping is a surprise; there's no OS reason for that to be slower. Possibly if your types are really large and complicated, the debugger has to fetch a lot of data to refresh its view of state each time?