A Certifiable Very Cool Trick

[David Arnold]

From: David Arnold <arnold at dstc.edu.au>

-->"BAW" == Barry A Warsaw <bwarsaw at cnri.reston.va.us> writes:

  BAW> My model was gdb's attach feature where you can attach to, stop
  BAW> and trace through a running external C program.  I would love
  BAW> to be able to do the same thing at the Python level.  We
  BAW> started talking about remote pdb's with threads listening on
  BAW> sockets, etc. (still cool ideas but more work).

on a (vaguely) related note, i was talking to Mark Hammond the other
day (hi Mark) about MS's ActiveDebugging(TM) (sp?) stuff.

as i understood it, each interpreter presents a set of COM APIs which
provide an abstract view of stack frames, etc, suitable for use by a
symbolic script debugger.  you can thus debug across scripting
languages using a single tool, watching calls between interpreters,
etc etc.

all very cool, and so i started thinking about doing the same thing
for Unix via gdb (for C) and the Python interpreter (what other
languages are there?  oh -- ELisp, yeah -- we can do that!)

of course, attaching to a running process should still be possible,
and thus the round-about relationship to the thread.

ahhhhh.  now, where's that spare time again?




d