Debug is hell
by Leandro Lucarella on 2009- 05- 04 03:24 (updated on 2009- 05- 04 03:24)- with 0 comment(s)
Warning
Rant ahead.
If Matt Groeing would ever written a garbage collector I'm sure he would made a book in the Life in Hell series called Debug is Hell.
You can't rely on anything: unit tests are useless, they depend on your code to run and you can't get a decent backtrace ever using a debugger (the runtime calls seems to hidden to the debugger). I don't know if the last one is a compiler issue (I'm using DMD right now because my LDC copy broken =( ).
Add that to the fact that GNU Gold doesn't work, DMD doesn't work, Tango doesn't work [*] and LDC doesn't work, and that it's already hard to debug in D because most of the mainstream tools (gdb, binutils, valgrind) don't support the language (can't demangle D symbols for instance) and you end up with a very hostile environment to work with.
Anyway, it was a very unproductive weekend, my statistics gathering code seems to have some nasty bug and I'm not being able to find it.
PS: I want to apologize in advance to the developers of GNU Gold, DMD, Tango and LDC because they make great software, much less crappier than mine (well, to be honest I'm not so sure about DMD ;-P), it's just a bad weekend. Thank you for your hard work, guys =)
| [*] | Tango trunk is supposed to be broken for Linux |