Re: [outcome] Inline GDB pretty printing support

From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-08-08 17:36:36

On 08/08/2024 17:56, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 4:04 PM Jeff Trull via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
> 
>> Creating a formal framework for them to be included with Boost itself would
>>   be pretty cool.
> 
> 
> We could add a section "Debugger Visualizers" to the Contributor's Guide.
> At first it can just list some resources, and over time we can add best
> practices and examples for how authors and maintainers may add support to
> their libraries.

I would much rather that the maintainer of the library inlines the 
visualisers for their library, and then maintains them over time as 
their library changes.

To make this work well, what we really need and don't have is a 
visualiser testing framework i.e. unit tests will fail if your 
visualiser stops matching your C++.

I fell foul of this exact problem:

https://github.com/ned14/outcome/issues/301

I suspect that another copy of the visualiser overrode the inline one, 
and so I didn't see this failure until it was too late (master is now 
locked).

What would be super great (hint: C++ Alliance funded) is if Boost had 
convenient tooling which in both b2 and cmake invoked the gdb/MSVC 
debugger during unit tests and checked that a corpus of library use 
snippets do produce the correct visualisations in the debugger.

It's a chunky enough bit of work, highly unlikely to be done in 
volunteer time as it'll be tedious and boring and annoying.

Niall