- Mon Jun 29, 2015 12:44 pm
#21990
cal wrote:Dear IoT entusiasts!
Is there any interest on using a debugger like gdb to analyze your programs running on the esp8266?
Using gdb directly or one of the multiple frontends like eclipse you could
- step to your code on C and/or assembler level,
- inspect registers/variables/memory
- set breakpoints in code,
- set watchpoints on memory changes,
- enter debugger on exceptions like exceptions 28 or 29 (illegal read or write access)
- print and inspect call stacks
I am asking this because new replies on the threads talking about debuggers are discouraging low.
Is that because you think you can't help in building the debug solution or do you think it is not needed or useful or you don't know or don't care?
Curious,
Cal
Assuming that I might be typical of the many who jumped aboard the ESP8266 train, let me answer from my own perspective:
- The ESP8266 and especially the available ecosystems (frameworks) are surprisingly robust and fully-featured; I've found that so far, anything that will compile and flash will run as expected. So i haven't yet been stuck for the lack of a full debugger.
- It's easy to include debugging statements that output to serial at runtime
- The dev cycle (write, compile, flash, monitor serial) is dependable and pretty fast.
- I do have experience with debuggers in app dev environments, and from some smaller microcontroller IDEs, but not coming from a hard-core embedded background, I'm not that used to it (eg never used JTAG)
Nonetheless, I hope to grow in experience, and as my ESP8266 programs become more complex, a good debugger will become more important to me.
Hope this helps.
