This page is about the Eiffel debugging facilities integrated inside Eiffel Studio

Overview

Work in progress

Current

• Building this wiki page, with list of suggested features.

Done

• Improve the role of estudio/ec(ewb)/debugger/application

Now estudio is only an ec launcher
ec' contains the classic eiffel debugger (ewb) and when needed launch the eiffel debugger daemon ecdbgd
The eiffel classic debugger daemon ecdbgd launches and control the debuggee application
There is no more need for ebench lib and other linking particularities. 
Now thr workbench ec is able to debug and to be debugged at the same time. 
This helps a lot improving the classic eiffel debugger.

Suggestions

Here is a list of features we could think of, or suggested by Eiffel Studio users. There is no order for now.

• being able to set/modify an env variable for an execution, aka "Edit and continue" feature
• Being able to Attach/Detach Eiffel process
• Add functionalities on Breakpoint
  • tracepoint: output message when a stop point is reached
  • changepoint: stop when a value changed
• include direct variable values in exception trace
• Provide a way to pass environmental variables values to the debuggee
• Add an "auto values" panel (similar to watches point, but using the current feature/line to show "near" variables values
• Add tooltip on editor to show value of "pointed" variable
• Being able to abort an expression evaluation

On dotnet there is a timeout, if the expression is taking too long, but for now nothing similar on classic

• having named group of breakpoints, this could enable use to Enable/Disable groups of breakpoints
• auto save Breakpoints more often

Currently, the breakpoints are saved after : end of debugging session, end of compilation, end of Eiffel Studio session

• Ctrl-C on STRING object tool's tree should copy the whole string

For now, it copy the value displayed in the debugger's grid

• Improve the expanded display, to be more like Debug Viewer (like VS2005)

To be able to display XML data as XML, and so on 

• When an assertion fails need option to ignore it and continue

Please add your suggestions below

(this way it is easier for persons working on the debugger to notice new suggestions) ... Add your suggestions here ...

Current known limitations