Truncation proposal

[Christoph Koegl]

Hi.

I propose the following functionality for DDD:

Truncation (optional, perhaps with choice of length) of long strings. This
would help eliminate overly wide (and hence unusable) backtrace etc. windows
in presence of long template instances when debugging C++ programs. My current
backtrace windows is some 4000 pixels wide, the Close button is some estimated
70 cm off the right screen edge. Argh.
I also noticed that gdb outputs (sometimes) very long frame annotations in
response to up/down commands. These seem to slow down DDD's execution speed
very much. I don't know if gdb does this by default (since I do not use vanilla
gdb very often these days) or if DDD sets up custom frame annotations.
Very long strings also greatly diminish the utility of the data window.
Especially when using the STL in C++ programs one always has nested template
instances that result in veeeery long instance names. The boxes in the data
window are sometimes thousands of pixels wide, navigation is, well, suboptimal.
I think a truncation style such as StartingChars...EndingChars with user
defined values for the number of starting and ending characters would be nice.
In the data window I would like to see a popup menu entry "Truncate..." that
enables the user to truncate the string to the left of some "label = thing"
display entry.

What do you think?

Cheers, Christoph

PS. Another question: One of my applications is 60 MB with debug information.
    Gdb needs some time to read in the symbols table etc. But with DDD the
    loading takes three times as long (at least). Why? What kind of initiali-
    zation takes place within DDD? I just hate waiting 3 Minutes (on a Sparc
    Ultra 2 with 1G of RAM) for DDD to fire up ... ;-)
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Christoph Koegl, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern

E-Mail: address@hidden
WWW: http://www-madlener.informatik.uni-kl.de/ag-madlener/staff/koegl/koegl.html
Tel.: +49 631 205 3971 / Fax.: +49 631 205 2156
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