Re: Guile and GDB

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net> writes:

> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> Because one can achieve the same result with simple GDB macros such as
>> those attached below (actually Andy put similar macros in the
>> repository).
>
> Thanks for explaining, I understand now.  Although I still think that
> it's a useful extra benefit for the _GDB_ backtrace to show SCM data
> nicely, as you showed in your examples at
> http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2007-07/msg00231.html.

Well, admittedly, it looks nice.  :-)

>> One expects much more from a debugger, most notably being
>> able to analyze data without running code in the inferior process.
>  
> It's all running code of one kind or another; is there really a clear
> distinction here?

Yes: running code in the process being debugged is intrusive, and it
interferes with the behavior one is trying to observe.  It's also
impossible in many cases, e.g., when the inferior process was stopped
due to SIGSEGV, or when inspecting from a core file.

Thanks,
Ludo'.