debugging tool

[gusl]

I would be interested in a general tool for figuring out who in the execution tree of the program is causing something to happen. We would define a set of events to watch for, like certain variables getting certain values or changing (and when to turn on/off the watch: otherwise this gets too inefficient), and it would print a stack trace + values of relevant variables whenever one of our events occurs.

This is a very simple idea, and very useful when you want to understand code that you didn't write. On the previous post that I wrote about this idea, different people said that what I wanted was "aspects", but that doesn't explain anything.

What tool do I want?

Comments

[dachte.livejournal.com]

gdb can do it. Take a look at the "watch" keyword.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHAHAHAthud.

Yeah, look at the keyword. Look at it very, very carefully. Follow the usage exactly.

And watch it cruelly, cruelly fail you.

[chrisamaphone]

strace is kind of like that but on the system level rather than the code level... it is a pretty neat tool anyway.

[douglasperkins.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you have a particular language and platform in mind? Various IDEs have gdb-like things (or gdb) integrated with them.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Yes, Java.

[douglasperkins.livejournal.com]

-jdb
-Eclipse has an extensive debugger

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

It would also be nice to know about such a tool for Lisp.