torkell | (Reply)

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Turned out that the lack of variables was mainly due to optimisation. Presumably gcc's optimiser is a very different beast to MSVC, as when debugging optimised Windows DLLs WinDbg managed to keep track of everything. They still didn't reliably appear with optimisation disabled. Oh, and to get an annotated assembly listing you can use "objdump -S" but only if your debugging information is in Stabs format (which is neither documented nor the default) and your program is not optimised. This allowed me to finally track down the bug (someone declared a function-level temporary variable as static and then used that function as the entry point for 84 threads - the best part is this program worked when it was first used many years ago!)

On frontends... I've played with ddd (a X frontend for gdb), and it's a lot friendlier to use but does require X installed. It still completely failed at showing me the contents of things like std::vector, but that's more of a gripe with their standard library (and I did find a macro for gdb to decode those). I doubt you'll want to install X on your AVR, which leaves you with the wonderfully flaky gdb server system (which is a thin client setup, so you need your symbols on the target, and the remote debugger tended to segfault every time I told it to restart the debuggee).