GDB 7.0 released
GDB 7.0, the GNU Debugger, is now available for download. There are many interesting improvements and bugfixes, but I find two new features worth a special mention. Those are "reverse debugging" and "Python scripting" support.
The first one allows to run programs backwards, written in any
language supported by GDB. Of course this isn't a trivial task, since
rewinding a program requires a lot of extra work on tracing variables,
registers and other stuff and not every target environment can support
that. GDB provides several new commands for reverse execution. Most
are just counterparts of the original commands, but prefixed with the
"reverse" keyword, e.g.
reverse-continue
, reverse-step
,
reverse-next
, etc.
The latter feature allows for Python scripting with GDB by
providing the gdb
module in the Python code. This
heavily extends GDB possibilities, from a simple pretty-printers,
through custom GDB commands, to any Python code you can possibly
imagine using GDB API. Someone even recently scripted
a "gdb
over irc" :-).