Re: [Boost-users] Support of Pretty print

Zachary Turner wrote:

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Mario Chacon wrote:

...

eheh... I do not know enough to write pretty prints, it's will be help if there are some example that other can continue, Do you know if exist some pretty print boost exampless?

It's nothing specific to boost, you just have to learn the GDB macro language. One of the difficulties in writing GDB pretty prints is that, unlike with Visual Studio debug visualizers, GDB pretty printing does not happen "automatically". You have to write a special command for every single type you want to pretty print. "printboostvariant", "printboostany", "printboostfspath", etc. It's a little bit annoying for sure. You can get around this even by writing a GDB plugin.

I guess much of confusion has resulted from the fact that Mario did not say what exactly he is talking about. The GDB pretty-printers he mention have nothing to do with that inadequate-for-anything GDB macro language. These are Python pretty-printers. See: http://tromey.com/blog/?p=524 These are also documented in the development version of the GDB.

If you want to write a GDB plugin, there is not as much available info, but you can refer to this page:

http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2008-05/msg00671.html

in which someone submitted a plugin for GDB to automatically display correctly STL types just by using the normal "print" statement.

That specific patch did not went further, since Python support was already in development. - Volodya