Many years ago, I was involved (as a co-founder) in a startup called Win GDB. In brief, it was an add-in for Visual Studio allowing to debug programs with GDB in various scenarios (e.g. native Linux/Solaris applications on a remote host, embedded Linux on a connected device, etc.). Over time it evolved into a more versatile tool helping in other development stages like building or deploying. To drive GDB, it exploited GDB/MI Interface. Later, we also added support for Android (Java).
Instead of creating a new add-in meant strictly for Android, the solution was a command-line tool that would support GDB/MI Interface at the front-end, and drive Java debugging using JDI at the back-end. This is how this project came about. From the Visual Studio add-in point of view, it was yet another GDB binary to drive.
It implements only a subset of GDB/MI commands which we call from VS Add-in. They are easy to find in code by pattern "^done," which is the standard prefix GDB returns in a command result while working in GDB/MI mode.
I was the main developer of that module, although the co-founder was also involved in it. Therefore the sources, are not complete. Some parts (like expression parser) have been removed as not implemented by me. Hence it is buildable but can't run properly. Although, I thought it is still worth putting into GitHub as my portfolio, and a prove I touched Java in the past ;-)
- engine - the actual code in Java implementing GDB/MI commands, calls to JDI, and all related logic and data structures. Due to the reasons mentioned above the code is incomplete.
- debugger - a simple Java package containing only one routine wingdbJavaDebugger.Debugger.main, it starts the engine.
- launcher - a simple Windows console application written in C++ that starts the debugger. It is executed by Visual Studio Add-in. The code published here is incomplete, and can't be built.
The project depends on jython and package com.sun.jdi
.
cd engine
set CLASSPATH=c:\jython2.7.2\jython.jar
javac -Xlint -classpath %CLASSPATH% *.java