XCode debugger sucks; alternatives?

Question

I've been programming on the Mac since I was a little kid using THINK C. I've never had to use a debugger as bad as the one that comes with XCode.

• It's unresponsive, and bogs down further and becomes unstable when watching more variables.
• When it crashes, I lose undo history for my sources because it's integrated with the editor.
• It doesn't benefit from integration, though, as the source viewer is unusable for stepping: Trying to select a line by clicking on the left margin makes a button appear from nowhere which causes to program to continue to that line, in the editor window, which shouldn't relate to debugging in the first place. Horrible UI and horrible implementation.
• A hobbled pretty-data "summary" syntax which can't send an object to the Expressions window.
• he Expressions window isn't aware of any kind of context, ever.
• Can't select a particular thread to debug, far as I can tell, and doesn't jump to the thread that called abort().

The kernel debugger for Mac OS 9 was better than this. It's time to give up.

What standalone front-ends for GDB work on OS X? I found http://ddd.darwinports.com/ but it's hard to find praise or anecdotes for it, or other alternatives.

Support for STL containers is a big plus for me. I couldn't care less about Objective-C or Apple-anything.

Answer 1

Have you tried monodevelop? It can build and debug C code, Not show how it handles obj-c.

If you can get DDD working I have used that with good results on many strange platforms. DDD requires X11.

Answer 2

I've had the same experience with XCode, and ended up switching to Netbeans and Eclipse (still not sure which one I prefer over the other, both have strong and weak points).

This may seem an odd choice, but both of them offer nice C++ support, reasonable debugger integration, and good project management options. I enjoy the refactoring tools and the source version control integration as well. Mind that they are not as snappy and clean as Visual Studio 6.

As many others here, I do not like Objective-C, and am pretty much fed-up with having to learn different environment/frameworks for each platform I write for (I use Linux and OSX daily, Windows on occasion). Both Netbeans and Eclipse are a big plus for portability. They also support other languages that I use sometimes for smaller projects (Python comes to mind).

Answer 3

I tend to use valgrind for memory related errors; gdb (in a teminal) when I want a backtrace; and logging + couts for all else (if it's not crashing, and there's no memory corruption, the bug seems easier).

Admittedtely, no idea how to debug multi threaded code.

Answer 4

I add to what anon said that I found also this trick on SO recently that allows easier STL debugging:

$ cd ~
$ svn co svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/trunk/libstdc++-v3/python
$ cat ~/.gdbinit
python
import sys
sys.path.insert(0, '/home/USERNAME/python/')
from libstdcxx.v6.printers import register_libstdcxx_printers
register_libstdcxx_printers (None)
end