Re: Insight vs DDD vs CodeMedic

["Eray Ozkural (exa)" <erayo at cs dot bilkent dot edu dot tr>]

Fernando Nasser wrote:
> 
> Jeff Stephens wrote:
> >
> > Does any one of these visual front ends for the gnu debugger hold an
> > advantage over the others?  Do any have significant disadvantages?
> 
> Insight is integrated with GDB and maybe because of that is so more
> powerful
> than DDD.
> 

I think it's best to think feature-wise. For instance, gdb5.0 has
better C++ debugging support or so it is said. Does insight give you
better C++ support than DDD? That would be important. I wrote in
the debian desription text that insight is a "tight" interface to
gdb which I think should imply that all relevant APIs have a corresponding
graphical control.

For instance, in DDD I sometimes cannot view an existing variable's
name when the type is complicated or cannot see the type of a var. Those
limitations I think were due to the older inferior gdb version.

> Of course, if you ask in the DDD list people may tell you otherwise :-)
>

DDD has some nice features really. I was thinking of extending DDD for
some not-seen-anywhere C++ support but when I looked at the source code
I gave it up. If you did those, insight would be a *killer* C++ product
though. Because it's lean, mean and portable. :)

I was very surprised when I saw the *same* debugger working on both
cygwin and on linux. The only thing that is problematic was the hacked
versions of tcl/tk in the source tree, which I tried to solve as you know.
Aside from a few functions broken, it works but I haven't had the time
to fix those bugs. I'm basically awaiting the real developers do the migration
to latest tcl/tk/itcl/itk/...  The same problem with sourcenav, too.
 
> I haven't used CodeMedic yet.
>

I did, but it didn't seem to provide much functionality. In my opinion,
DDD is more stable but insight has better ideas. Tho, the data visualization
part of DDD is really neat but not quite state-of-the-art.

I'll write a small RFC to detail my wishes for C++ support.

Regards,

-- 
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo