rr VS gdb-dashboard

https://rr-project.org/ had the same problem. They use the retired conditional branch counter instead of instruction counter, and then instruction steeping until at the correct address.

That'll work great for your Distributed QSort Incorporated startup, where the only product is a sorting algorithm.

Formal software verification is very useful. But what can be usefully formalized is rather limited, and what can be formalized correctly in practice is even more limited. That means you need to restrict your scope to something sane and useful. As a result, in the real world running thousands of tests is practically useful. (Well, it depends on what those tests are; it's easy to write 1000s of tests that either test the same thing, or only test the things that will pass and not the things that would fail.) They are especially useful if running in a mode where the unexpected happens often, as it sounds like this system can do. (It's reminiscent of rr's chaos mode -- https://rr-project.org/ linking to https://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/02/introducing-rr-chaos-mo... )

The approach of check-pointing computation such that it is resumable and restartable sounds similar to a time-traveling debugger, like rr or WinDbg:

https://rr-project.org/

https://learn.microsoft.com/windows-hardware/drivers/debugge...

https://rr-project.org

This is indeed a problem people have with debuggers, so some very smart people found a way to fix it.

...and you're not on Linux, because on Linux we have rr! https://rr-project.org/

(I still use print statements 99.99% of the time though)

https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr?tab=readme-ov-file#system-...

> I've heard Linux support was down to like one guy [...]

Linux support is down to you. It's down to all of us. Install rr (https://rr-project.org/) and capture a crash with it.

Then you can replay the crash, find out that it's actually crashing in your closed-source graphics driver, which will motivate you to switch to an open source driver and fix your issue.

Also, while you're at it, update your linux kernel and wayland. They've both had bugs that could manifest as random firefox crashes in the last several months.

I imagine you are referring to https://rr-project.org/ ?

Had never heard of it, looks pretty amazing, I might actually enjoy debugging now!

To debug, termdebug is built in to vim and supports a front end to gdb. In combination with gdb-dashboard this gives a reasonably good debugging experience

https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard, https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard/wiki

I was using gdb-dashboard: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard seems kind of like gef.

Try GDB Dashboard, it makes gdb much easier to use:

https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

There's also Voltron which works with both gdb and lldb (amongst others):

https://github.com/snare/voltron

I can't believe no one has mentioned `gdb-dashboard` [1] yet! I use it extensively. [2]

Beyond that, I have recently learned how to write custom pretty printers for GDB. This saves a lot of screen space. I should probably update [2] soon with those new techniques.

GDB is powerful, useful, and after getting my start in IDE debuggers, including Visual Studio, I struggle whenever I have to go back.

[1]: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/12/my-development-environment-a...

Debugging: Learn gdb. You can use it for assembly. You can use it for C on a MCU. You can use it for Go on a Linux system. It’s ubiquitous, versatile, and worth understanding. You can pretty-print the output with something like this to help you out at first. There are 2 things you need, however: on chip debugger and a debug probe (though you don’t need an expensive one). Effectively, you talk to GDB, GDB talks to the server exposed by OCD, OCD knows the debug probe protocol, and the debug probe can use the MCU debug peripheral via SWD or JTAG to get those details.

gdb-dashboard: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard Just a pretty wrapper for gdb, so it’s as stable as gdb itself. Pretty good if you like to stay in the terminal. You can run python scripts from it since you’re actually in gdb

I would even suggest use of System View Description – I use gdb-dashboard + gdb-dashboard-svdregisters. There are alternatives, of course.

There are a couple of wrappers that try to enhance it like GDB dashboard and GEF.