|
> This little sub-thread stemmed from a good tool that does already exist, and from unsubstantiated claims that C devs are students and that the simple build steps are too hard for most people. It's next to impossible to properly source any claim in this area; as for a lighter standard of substantiation, C wasn't a big deal in university courses 15 years ago, so it's unlikely to suddenly become it now. N=1, but back then, between C++ and Java courses jumping straight to IDEs (to focus on language instead of build steps), and Unix/C course sticking to direct calls to GCC, at least my year at my uni managed to go through 5 years without much exposure to make and Makefiles... Anyway, > Sure, a lot of software is written by junior devs but that has no bearing on whether gdb exists, or even how hard it is to build. But it does have a bearing on GDB evolution and GDB GUIs, which almost universally expose less than the bare minimum of useful GDB features; of those that expose more, I'm yet to find one that works. > We have lots of good debuggers, and luckily it only takes a few experts to write them, which is why we do have them in practice. Well, yes. WinDbg, that debugger in Visual Studio, etc. :). GDB, too. My point here is that, for better or worse, size and type of the target audience determines how much and what kind of attention the project gets. "Skilled, experienced developers" are a small niche; the vast majority of developers are fresh juniors (per the growth argument), creating pressure to satisfy them at their level. Which, for GCC, I guess it means the build steps remain arcane even relative to other GNU projects, and powerful GUI frontends for it are not a thing. |