[Openmcl-devel] debugging debugging

[Alexander Repenning]

we got early parts of our game engine ported to CCL. Things are going  
pretty well so far, i.e., event processing and threading working  
better than ever in MCL, but...

In the IDE version practically 90% of the code is running in some  
thread other than the main one, e.g., some method dealing with a mouse  
click, some animation running, some opengl view rendering. No problem  
as long as there is no bug. The moment there is a problem in any of  
these event handling, animation or rendering methods one gets the  
AltConsole. In there I usually do not get a prompt to do anything  
meaningful. I have to scroll back to see what caused the problem "***  
Error in event process:  ...." The functionality is very limited  
compared to getting the same bug in the main thread with feedback in  
the listener. I cannot

- get an interactive backtrace: backtrace list with disclosure triangles
- get restart menus
- clear/delete the content. Text just piles up. The Edit > Delete menu  
does not work. A clear button similar to the OS X console would be great

In other words the problem is that in 90% of the cases (code running  
in non main thread) one gets 10% of the debugging functionality. In  
MCL a new thread associated Listener would pop up giving the developer  
the same debugging tools no matter which thread caused the issue.

Could that functionality be added to CCL?

alex



Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf


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