Re: Status of Strongtalk C++ code: VM stability and progress on a graphical debugger

Hi Shaping,
As far as an a debugger goes, there is a rudimentary debugger. It was
intended to become a full debugger, but was never completed. You can easily
bring it up by evaluating a send of an undefined message (e.g., Object new
someUndefinedMethod).  Use the meta button to get an inspector on it, and
you'll see that it is an instance of class StackTraceInspector.

The nice thing about it is that (like Self's debugger), it uses the visual
metaphor of a stack. Each stack frame is presented by an ActivationOutliner,
which should communicate with a mirror representing the stack frame
in question, an instance of Activation. There is also an ActivationVMMirror,
but it doesn't seem to do much at the moment. I don't recall the intent
there (this stuff got done while I was on leave when my son was born), but
in general mirrors are subdivided into low level mirrors that depend on VM
specifics, and high level mirrors representing the language level
abstraction.

Expanding this to a full debugger may or may not require adding some
primitives to the VM. It may be a matter of setting up the GUI to call
existing facilities used by the console debugger.


-- 
Cheers, Gilad

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