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Bug 103871

Summary: Properly integrate omniscient debugging
Product: debugger Reporter: gbevin <gbevin>
Component: CodeAssignee: Martin Entlicher <mentlicher>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: blocker Keywords: L&F, USABILITY
Priority: P3    
Version: 5.x   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
URL: http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT Exception Reporter:

Description gbevin 2007-05-13 19:26:34 UTC
I know that there's a very small plugin for the omniscient debugger
(http://www.nbextras.org/2006/04/25/1145995945018.html). It's however very raw
in functionality. I'm used to Omnicore's X-develop debugger, which is tightly
integrated and allows you to see exactly which code paths the debugger has
followed over your code. This gives you runtime code coverage support where you
can exactly see which functionality executes which parts of your code.
Additionally, they also allow you to mouse over your variables, fields and
arguments and you'll see a tooltip with the history of all their values, this is
extremely handy when you're debugging a loop and you want to know how they
variable evolve over time.
Omnicore's version is also a lot lighter on memory usage since I think they
activate the functionality on code paths that are accessible from the
breakpoints that you've set in the debugger.
Comment 1 gbevin 2007-05-13 19:39:09 UTC
More info about this, excerpt from
http://www.theserverside.com/reviews/thread.tss?thread_id=42457:

Back-in-time debugging has been around as a research project called 'Omniscient
Debugging' for years, but has never been integrated in an IDE. While it might be
mistaken with the 'pop last frame' functionality in JDB and other debuggers,
it's totally different. When you're debugging, X-develop captures the values of
all the variables and allows you to step back and step out of methods, line by
line, exactly like when you're stepping forward but then in reverse. The
debugger also provides you with real-time code coverage information and gives
you an easy insight into all the historic values of variables by simply mousing
over your them in your source code. The individual statements that have been
executed are highlighted and you get a much more detailed view than the
line-based information that traditional coverage tools provide. It would be nice
though to be able to use this in an unassisted mode and export the coverage
information so that it can be inspected without having to run the debugger,
X-develop doesn't support this yet.
Comment 2 hapeso 2007-10-02 17:36:23 UTC
While GUI polishing is not on his priority list, Bil Lewis [mailto:Bil@LambdaCS.com] the developer of the ODB
(Omniscient Debugger) would probably support a serious effort to integrate this functionality into NetBeans.
Comment 3 Martin Entlicher 2007-10-04 14:52:22 UTC
We're pleased with the interest to integrate the omniscient debugging into NetBeans.
Currently we're busy with NetBeans 6.0, doing stabilization work and bugfixes. After the release we start planning for
the next one, so we will consider this integration.
Thus, stay tuned, we'll let you know as soon as we know what our plans are.
Comment 4 bil_lewis 2007-12-04 03:06:47 UTC
I think this would be wonderful!

I haven't done much with the ODB recently. Well, other than use it all the time.

I've tried to get a plugin for Eclipse too.

And I'd be all ears about ideas.

-Bil