Debugging of native extensions on windows

Hello!

I am dropping this mail to bring up an issue which cost me three good 
evenings of time. Now that i figured it out i believe it is quite a 
serious usability problem.

Gist of the problem: i have some C++ code wrapped with SWIG, so a native 
extension. As with all software - there was a bug. However, no matter 
what i did - i could not debug it in a native debugger. I ran 
".venv/Scripts/python.exe script.py" in a native debugger and 
breakpoints would not be hit, application would crash eventually. This 
was especially confusing, because exact same setup worked just fine on 
linux. I eventually stumbled on to process list showing 
".venv/Scripts/python.exe" having spawned a subprocess... Which led me 
to "PC/launcher.c" which is what ".venv/Scripts/python.exe" really is. I 
cant find much information about this behavior in documentation even 
after the fact. All in all, this was quite confusing. So now every time 
i want to debug a native extension i have to start a program and then 
attach a debugger to it, instead of just hitting "Debug" button in IDE. 
It gets worse if crash happens immediately, which means i have to resort 
to things like adding a message box somewhere to block execution and 
give me enough time to attach the debugger. It works in the end, but 
user experience is really not great. But whats worse - this is such a 
non-obvious behavior that many more people may trip on it and waste 
their time. Documenting this behavior would be of little help too, as 
there is no clear path from the issue to the documentation on the matter...

So there it is. I am sure it is the way it is for a good reason. 
However, this is a very error-prone process which is likely to waste 
people's time. So maybe this behavior could be reconsidered? Or maybe 
there is a solution already, which escaped me?

-- 
-- Rokas Kupstys