Mon, 18 Aug 2008

Nemiver : A GUI debugger for GNOME.

The many years, Linux has lacked a good GUI debugger for C and C++ programs. Yes, everyone knows about GNU GDB, but that is a command line debugger and really not very useful for stepping through a program. There was also the Data Display Debugger (DDD) which uses the Motif widget set, usually supplied by the Lesstif Project. Unfortunately, Lesstif development has basically been abandoned and OpenMotif is not really an option because its license fails to meet term 8 of the Open Software Definition.

This means that for many years, developers on Linux have tended to avoid the "stepping through code with a debugger" approach to debugging. While I think that single stepping is not the most applicable to every debugging problem, there are times when single stepping is useful and possibly also the fastest way to track down a problem.

However, I was recently made aware of a new GUI debugger for the GNOME (ie really the Linux) desktop, Nemiver.


nemiver screen shot

The only problem with nemiver is that the version in Ubuntu Hardy is a little old and was giving me a few troubles. However, after building and installing a version 2.2.0-2 package of libgtksourceviewmm-2.0 from source I was able to build nemiver from SVN and so far its working way better than DDD ever did.

So, here it is, a good looking, stable and capable GUI debugger for Linux.

Posted at: 19:39 | Category: CodeHacking | Permalink