Introduction
Developers spend a lot of time debugging and maintaining current codebases. Understanding different methods of debugging are critical. Some developers still feel comfortable with more manual ways of debugging. There are also a lot of snapshot tools that give you a detailed report of the issues and errors after a certain part of the code runs. Both of these approaches can be beneficial but they are often focused on when the error happens. With the help of debugger tools, we can see how an error has happened.
In this post, we will be examining gdbgui, an extension of gdb, with visual debugging abilities, which will help us debug compiled languages.
What is gdb?
gdb is a very handy tool for debugging compiled languages such as C, C++, Go, Rust, etc. It is available for common operating systems such as Mac, Windows, and Linux. This debugger can help us in several ways such as:
- Getting an overview of program variables and context when the error occurs
- If a core dump, which is the state of memory at a specific time, happens because of a crash or abnormal termination, we can understand what statement of expression caused it
- Stopping on parts of the program that are causing issues while the program is running
