I’ve been trying out MinGW’s new 4.2.1 gcc compilers. As I mentioned previously, they’re experimental. But I’ve gotten really good feedback from people that moving to 4.2.1 is a great move and will help make MinGW a serious choice for developers.

They actually have two variants of gcc that they’re working on. One of them supports exception handling based on the debug information gathered using the DWARF standard. It’s apparently much more efficient than the default one based on setjmp/longjmp. I’m not sure what that all means, but my take is that the dwarf version is better.

At any rate, I had a problem using the dwarf version that I didn’t have using the default (sjlj) version. If I specify the path to a file using Windows traditional back slashes, e.g. ..\main.cpp, gdb got confused and I couldn’t set a breakpoint on a line. And, unfortunately, CDT’s builder builds files this way and I my breakpoints failed to get set.

So, I downloaded the source to MinGW’s gdb, configure and built it and set up a debug session, all within the CDT (this worked since configure generates forward slashes). I was able to set breakpoints, look at the dwarf symbol data that gdb was trying to use and found where the line number info was missing. And with that information, I was able to generate a hopefully helpful bug report that the MinGW developers can take, or if I find the time, I can try out different solutions. The only trouble I had was making sure which gdb was which :).

At any rate, this brought home again why I love using IDEs for development (which gave me a great intro for an article I’m writing). The productivity of using a debug environment that provides point and click visualization of debug information has to be at least ten-fold over using command line debuggers, and maybe a hundred-fold over using printfs. Once you start using it, you’ll never go back.