I've been trying for weeks now to get lldb working with C++11 on Mavericks, and I just cannot get it working reliably. Has anyone managed this? What exact steps did you take?
Symptoms I find include:
(1) Unable to invoke basic std functions, like if I have a vector v in the code, I cannot call "v.size()" (earlier StackOverflow responses agreed with this).
(2) Generally gets confused all the time about data types and classes. Sometimes it understands simple things, sometimes it just gives odd error messages, and misinterprets user types.
(3) If I stop the code and call a bunch of other functions, lldb sometimes just gets very confused, and I have seen utterly bizarre run-time behavior (e.g., I call a function from lldb and get logically impossible results, as if the call stack or memory was somehow mangled).
(4) Sometimes lldb just gives up and seems to lose track of where it is on the stack.
I know these are vague, but has anyone used lldb extensively for expression evaluation (not just breakpoints, but calling functions and methods from with debugger) and had lldb work? I have these very complex, very large datastructures and need an interactive debugger to manipulate them, and invoke methods on them, interactively (i.e., a repl).
Not part of the question, but if anyone knows of a true C++11 debugger that can call methods and evaluate functions at run time interactively, and works reliably on MacOS Mavericks, I'd be very grateful.
N.B. earlier MacOS versions are entirely different from Mavericks.
I don't know about 2-4, they are not specific enough to really tell. But #1 turns out to be a problem with the new C++ standard library on OS X. It is pretty aggressive about inlining most of the std::* functions, and not creating out of line copies. That's actually usually exactly what you want, but it is inconvenient for debugging!
You usually see errors like:
(lldb) expr my_vec.size()
error: call to a function 'std::__1::vector<int, std::__1::allocator<int> >::size() const' ('_ZNKSt3__16vectorIiNS_9allocatorIiEEE4sizeEv') that is not present in the target
And that's because there is no function to call, there's only inlined versions sprinkled through-out your code.
In C++11 you can work around this if you know in advance you will want to call functions in some particular template class by putting:
template class std::vector<int>;
for instance, in you code somewhere. Probably want to do this inside some kind of #ifdef DEBUG construct, you wouldn't want to ship code this way.
Related
I'm using GCC 4.7.2. My code is rather heavy on template, STL and boost usage. When I compile and there is an error in some class or function that is derived from or uses some boost/STL functionality, I get error messages showing spectacularly hideous return types and/or function arguments for my classes/function.
My question:
Is there a prettyprint type of thing for GCC warnings/errors containing boost/STL types, so that the return types shown in error messages correspond to what I've typed in the code, or at least, become more intelligible?
I have briefly skimmed through this question, however, that is about GDB rather than GCC...
I've also come across this pretty printer in Haskell, but that just seems to add structure, not take away (mostly) unneeded detail...
Any other suggestions?
I asked a similar question, where someone suggested I try gccfilter. It's a Perl script that re-formats the output of g++ and colorizes it, shortens it, hides full pathnames, and lots more.
Actually, that suggestion answers this question really well too: it's capable of hiding unneeded detail and pretty-printing both STL and boost types. So: I'll leave this here as an answer too.
The only drawback I could see is that g++ needs to be called from within the script (i.e., piping to it is not possible at the time). I suspect that's easily fixed, and in any case, it's a relatively minor issue.
You could try STLfilt as mentioned in 'C++ Template Metaprogramming' by David Abrahms & Alesky Gurtovoy.
The book contains a chapter on template message diagnostics. It suggests using the STLFilt /showback:N to eliminate compiler backtrace material in order to get simplified output.
I'm looking at a piece of very old VB6, and have come across usages such as
Form5!ProgressBar.Max = time_max
and
Form5!ProgressBar.Value = current_time
Perusing the answer to this question here and reading this page here, I deduce that these things mean the same as
Form5.ProgressBar.Max = time_max
Form5.ProgressBar.Value = current_time
but it isn't at all clear that this is the case. Can anyone confirm or deny this, and/or point me at an explanation in words of one syllable?
Yes, Form5!ProgressBar is almost exactly equivalent to Form5.ProgressBar
As far as I can remember there is one difference: the behaviour if the Form5 object does not have a ProgressBar member (i.e. the form does not have a control called ProgressBar). The dot-notation is checked at compile time but the exclamation-mark notation is checked at run time.
Form5.ProgressBar will not compile.
Form5!ProgressBar will compile but will give an error at runtime.
IMHO the dot notation is preferred in VB6, especially when accessing controls. The exclamation mark is only supported for backward-compatibility with very old versions of VB.
The default member of a Form is (indirectly) the Controls collection.
The bang (!) syntax is used for collection access in VB, and in many cases the compiler makes use of it to early bind things that otherwise would be accessed more slowly through late binding.
Far from deprecated, it is often preferable.
However in this case since the default member of Form objects is [_Default] As Object containing a reference to a Controls As Object instance, there is no particular advantage or disadvantage to this syntax over:
Form5("ProgressBar").Value
I agree that in this case however it is better to more directly access the control as a member of the Form as in:
Form5.ProgressBar.Value
Knowing the difference between these is a matter of actually knowing VB. It isn't simply syntactic though, the two "paths" do different things that get to the same result.
Hopefully this answer offers an explanation rather merely invoking voodoo.
Is there any support for debugging xpath user-defined functions in the latest Saxon PE? I've used the trace function, but it seems to work in some contexts and not in others. I'm sure there's a logic to that, but I don't understand it. I'm really looking for something simple like something akin to <xsl:message>.
Thanks in advance.
I suspect your calls on trace() are working, but the output is confusing because of lazy evaluation, which means that things are often evaluated in a different order from what you expect. In fact, the optimizer can sometimes rearrange the expressions you write in your source into something quite different.
Have you tried the debuggers in tools like Stylus Studio or oXygen? Typically these disable some optimizations, making the sequence of execution more comprehensible.
This is my attempt to start a collection of GCC special features which usually do not encounter. this comes after #jlebedev in the another question mentioned "Effective C++" option for g++,
-Weffc++
This option warns about C++ code which breaks some of the programming guidelines given in the books "Effective C++" and "More Effective C++" by Scott Meyers. For example, a warning will be given if a class which uses dynamically allocated memory does not define a copy constructor and an assignment operator. Note that the standard library header files do not follow these guidelines, so you may wish to use this option as an occasional test for possible problems in your own code rather than compiling with it all the time.
What other cool features are there?
From time to time I go through the current GCC/G++ command line parameter documentation and update my compiler script to be even more paranoid about any kind of coding error. Here it is if you are interested.
Unfortunately I didn't document them so I forgot most, but -pedantic, -Wall, -Wextra, -Weffc++, -Wshadow, -Wnon-virtual-dtor, -Wold-style-cast, -Woverloaded-virtual, and a few others are always useful, warning me of potentially dangerous situations. I like this aspect of customizability, it forces me to write clean, correct code. It served me well.
However they are not without headaches, especially -Weffc++. Just a few examples:
It requires me to provide a custom copy constructor and assignment operator if there are pointer members in my class, which are useless since I use garbage collection. So I need to declare empty private versions of them.
My NonInstantiable class (which prevents instantiation of any subclass) had to implement a dummy private friend class so G++ didn't whine about "only private constructors and no friends"
My Final<T> class (which prevents subclassing of T if T derived from it virtually) had to wrap T in a private wrapper class to declare it as friend, since the standard flat out forbids befriending a template parameter.
G++ recognizes functions that never return a return value, and throw an exception instead, and whines about them not being declared with the noreturn attribute. Hiding behind always true instructions didn't work, G++ was too clever and recognized them. Took me a while to come up with declaring a variable volatile and comparing it against its value to be able to throw that exception unmolested.
Floating point comparison warnings. Oh god. I have to work around them by writing x <= y and x >= y instead of x == y where it is acceptable.
Shadowing virtuals. Okay, this is clearly useful to prevent stupid shadowing/overloading problems in subclasses but still annoying.
No previous declaration for functions. Kinda lost its importance as soon as I started copypasting the function declaration right above it.
It might sound a bit masochist, but as a whole, these are very cool features that increased my understanding of C++ and general programming.
What other cool features G++ has? Well, it's free, open, it's one of the most widely used and modern compilers, consistently outperforms its competitors, can eat almost anything people throw at it, available on virtually every platform, customizable to hell, continuously improved, has a wide community - what's not to like?
A function that returns a value (for example an int) will return a random value if a code path is followed that ends the function without a 'return value' statement. Not paying attention to this can result in exceptions and out of range memory writes or reads.
For example if a function is used to obtain the index into an array, and the faulty code path is used (the one that doesn't end with a return 'value' statement) then a random value will be returned which might be too big as an index into the array, resulting in all sorts of headaches as you wrongly mess up the stack or heap.
This question HAS had to be asked before, so it kills me to ask it again, but I can't find it for all of my google and searching stackoverflow.
I'm porting a bunch of linux code to windows, and a good chunk of it makes the assumption that everything is automatically initialized to zero or null.
int whatever;
char* something;
...and then immediately doing something that may leave 'something' null, and testing against 'something'
if(something == NULL)
{
.......
}
I would REALLY like not to have to go back throughout this code and say:
int whatever = 0;
char* something = NULL;
Even though that is the proper way to deal with it. It's just very time consuming.
Otherwise, I declare a variable, and it's initialized to something crazy if I don't set it myself.
This option doesn't exist in MSVC, and honestly, whoever coded your application made a big mistake. That code is not portable, as C/C++ say that uninitialized variables have an undefined value. I suggest setting the "treat warnings as errors" option and recompiling; MSVC should give you a warning every time a variable is used without being initialized.
No - there's no option to do that in MSVC.
Debug builds will initialize them with something else (0xcc I think), but not zero. Unfortunately, your code is bugged and needs fixed (of course this applies only to automatic variables -for statics and globals it's fine to assume they're zero initialized). I'm surprised there was any compiler that supported that behavior - if there's an option to do that in GCC, I haven't heard of it (but I'm no expert in the dusty corners of GCC).
You may hear that an earlier version of MSVC would init variables to zero in debug builds (similar to the way 0xcc is used in VS 2005), but as far as I know that's untrue.
edit ----------
Well, I'll be damned - GCC does (or did?) have the -finit-local-zero option. Looks like it's there mostly for Fortran support, I think.
I'd suggest using compiler warnings about using uninitialized variables to help you catch 99% of your problems. I know it's not a great bit of work, but it should be done if at all possible.
Interestingly, MSVC now does have the ability to do this. The Microsoft Security team wrote a blog post about it here, and there's a CppCon talk here.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like this option is exposed to the public. This page lists a bunch of 'hidden MSVC flags', and it includes an option called -initall, so that might be it.
What I ended-up doing was switching to /w4. At this level, it caught most of the "yeah, that's going to be an issue" areas of initialization. Otherwise, there's nothing that can change everything from being 0xcccccccc on initialization to 0x00000000 that I saw.
Massive thanks to everyone for answering this, and yes, we will tighten it up in the future.