Re: What are your top desired improvements in Xcode ?
Re: What are your top desired improvements in Xcode ?
- Subject: Re: What are your top desired improvements in Xcode ?
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:25:11 +1100
My #1 request would be to have the debuger work like in almost any other system. When I look at a variable that has an NSDictionary it should show me meaningful data about the dictionary. It should not just show me an ISA value. If a class's implementation is hidden there should be a way to see more detail about that object in the GUI. I do not want to have to use the GDB console to do debugging. At the least the description string and such should be displayed automatically, not requiring a GDB command. Objective-C knows what a class is doing, and can use public accessors to display data about the class. If it is a collection class the contained objects should be displayed with their detail.
You want Xcode to invoke the 'description' method on every object pointer it ever sees? Or worse, arbitrary methods? Aside from the performance implications, what happens if there's a bug in one of those 'description' implementations? I don't want my debug session to die as soon as I step into a method with some dodgy implementation.
You're asking to elevate gdb above the level of the primitive class structure, which you don't get in any other C/C++ system because there is nothing but primitive structures in C/C++. Perhaps if you could provide an example of another *Objective-C* debugger which does as you describe? (and I'm not a Smalltalk junkie, so I'm not sure I'll accept some obscure Smalltalk debugger as an answer :P )
I use po a lot (and other method invocations, occasionally), as I imagine anyone who debugs ObjC does. And it crashes a lot, or hangs because you're using locks in your code and your code would never call 'description' or whatever at that point, but you've just told gdb to. I don't think Xcode would be functional as a debugger if it tried to do this automatically - you're taking code designed for a particular control flow and making that flow completely arbitrary and disjoint; it's just not going to work for anything but the most trivial code.
Having said all that, perhaps a little button next to object variables which would display their 'description' - only if explicitly clicked - is a good idea. Saves a round-trip to the console window.
Wade Tregaskis
ICQ: 40056898 AIM, Yahoo & Skype: wadetregaskis
-- Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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