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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the course and instructors. I wrote this as a TA for our Computing Systems class: http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3214/fall2011/projects/esh3-debu...

When students came to me for help, my first two questions were always "What does gdb say?" and "What does valgrind say?" If they couldn't answer, I'd tell them to go find out.

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Yeah, GDB and Valgrind are heavily encouraged at the University of Michigan in both introductory and advanced classes. Talking to friends at other universities, it seems like most other places encourage it too.

As a student attending the University of Michigan this fall, I was looking through the introductory programming course syllabus and it mentions only ddd. Is gdb something used more heavily in further courses more specific to those pursuing a concentration in EECS?

ddd is a graphical frontend to gdb and a few other debuggers (like jdb). ddd's UI is straight out of the 90s era of commercial Unices, but I prefer it to gdb since it visualizes source code with breakpoints and the ip and has some nice variable displaying / plotting features (ie it's very easy to visualize a matrix AS a matrix if you're doing some graphics work)

edit: ddd also has a gdb prompt at the bottom, so you really don't lose much by using ddd over gdb unless you can't run an X server

cgdb is a nice visualization frontend too: <http://cgdb.github.com/>;

And for the die hard Emacs users there's: http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/02/fancy-debugging-with-gd...

I generally try to refrain from bringing up Emacs in threads that have nothing to do with it (since Emacs does everything) but I was pleasantly surprised by its gdb support and I have used it extensively in the past.

How does this compare to gdb TUI? For the most part I find TUI adequate but I'm always open to alternatives.

Maybe it's professor specific, but EECS 151, 280 and 281 all stressed using gdb. ddd was mentioned, but most of the debugging examples used gdb. I took these class several years ago though, so it's also possible things have changed since then.

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