A fun gdb frontend!

First time I really needed GDB was when I was debugging the generated code from a compiler that I was writing. It work wonders to aid me in the debugging process, but the interface was really bad. I wanted to inspect memory, the registers and step instruction by instruction, gdb makes all of this possible, but not in a nice way.

Recently I came across the idea of Tools for Thought which can be distilled as:

A tool that helps your thinking process, e.g: The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and Adobe Photoshop.

So, this project is an attempt to create a tool for thought that helps people to reason more deeply about the workings of computer programs.

Right now we have a vertical slice of the project (we have a thread running GDB that communicates to a thread that displays the source code). We have a few threads running, those are the main ones:

• GDB thread, it pipes the stdin/stdout to and form the GDB's process.
• Graphics thread.

I first considered writing this in C++, but then I thought about writing multithreaded code in it.

• Browse variables in a hierarchical manner.
• Set breakpoints

This application will be refactored into a separate library and a frontend, this way many applications will be able to use GDB's capabilities in a easy way.

If you want to help you need to setup the developing enviroment.

• Install the rust toolchain https://rustup.rs/
• Clone the repository
• Build this project's documentation cargo doc --no-deps --open