<story><title>Give me 15 minutes and I&apos;ll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PorfLSr3DDI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yen223</author><text>I used to think GDB was a tool with the most broken interface I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen, and which requires arcane commands to do the most trivial of debugging things.&lt;p&gt;I still do, but I used to too.&lt;p&gt;That early dig against Windows was particularly funny. There&amp;#x27;s no way I would pick that over Visual Studio&amp;#x27;s debugging tools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>I agree that gdb&amp;#x27;s syntax is ridiculous, having come from a background of DOS DEBUG and WinDbg, but what irritates me more are the implementations of certain functionality:&lt;p&gt;- No way to get a 16-column (bytes+ASCII) standard hexdump. This is functionality that even the most basic debugger should have, yet it&amp;#x27;s missing from gdb.&lt;p&gt;- &amp;quot;disassemble&amp;quot; command is next to useless.&lt;p&gt;- If you write &amp;quot;b 0x12345&amp;quot; intending to set a breakpoint at address 0x12345, it doesn&amp;#x27;t work. An unnecessary and nonsensical extra asterisk is needed (which makes it look like it&amp;#x27;s retrieving 4&amp;#x2F;8 bytes from 0x12345, and using &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; as the address of the breakpoint.)&lt;p&gt;- Starting gdb with a binary and passing arguments to it --- you&amp;#x27;d expect it to be smart enough to realise that anything after the executable name should be the arguments to the debuggee and not the debugger, but it isnt.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t use gdb often, but when I do, it&amp;#x27;s usually the option of last resort.</text></comment>
<story><title>Give me 15 minutes and I&apos;ll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PorfLSr3DDI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yen223</author><text>I used to think GDB was a tool with the most broken interface I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen, and which requires arcane commands to do the most trivial of debugging things.&lt;p&gt;I still do, but I used to too.&lt;p&gt;That early dig against Windows was particularly funny. There&amp;#x27;s no way I would pick that over Visual Studio&amp;#x27;s debugging tools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>GDB already felt like that when we had C++ Builder, Visual C++, Zortech C++ visual debuggers on mid-90&amp;#x27;s versions of Mac and Windows.&lt;p&gt;The only debuggers that could match them in usability and graphical debugging features were Motif based ones, being sold as a single product.</text></comment>