Re: [boost] [outcome] Inline GDB pretty printing support

On 08/08/2024 17:56, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 4:04 PM Jeff Trull via Boost wrote:

...

Creating a formal framework for them to be included with Boost itself would be pretty cool.

We could add a section "Debugger Visualizers" to the Contributor's Guide. At first it can just list some resources, and over time we can add best practices and examples for how authors and maintainers may add support to their libraries.

I would much rather that the maintainer of the library inlines the visualisers for their library, and then maintains them over time as their library changes. To make this work well, what we really need and don't have is a visualiser testing framework i.e. unit tests will fail if your visualiser stops matching your C++. I fell foul of this exact problem: https://github.com/ned14/outcome/issues/301 I suspect that another copy of the visualiser overrode the inline one, and so I didn't see this failure until it was too late (master is now locked). What would be super great (hint: C++ Alliance funded) is if Boost had convenient tooling which in both b2 and cmake invoked the gdb/MSVC debugger during unit tests and checked that a corpus of library use snippets do produce the correct visualisations in the debugger. It's a chunky enough bit of work, highly unlikely to be done in volunteer time as it'll be tedious and boring and annoying. Niall