[lldb-dev] Interactive commands in LLDB

[Siva Chandra]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 6:36 PM,  <jingham at apple.com> wrote:
> I haven't used the gdb "explore".  It does seem a little odd to me,
> like something that is well modeled by a turn-down GUI variable
> display but not so much by this kind of question & answer session.
> But I haven't used it so I can't say.

My own point of view: I have hardly ever used an IDE or GUI for dev
work or debugging. Having a CLI for this would likely be of value to
people like me. However, I do agree that if one is using a GUI, this
should not be required. But would that GUI require to understand the
current source language? For example, it should be able to do produce
syntax for field access like a.b->c.d. May be its not an issue.

> OTOH, I do have other uses for a slightly more advanced interactive
> IO handler.  For instance, it you do "process attach -n" and there are
> multiple processes with the same name, we show you a nice little
> listing of the processes and their arguments so you can figure out
> which PID you actually want to attach to.  But it would be nicer to say
> "here are these five processes, type the index of the one you want to
> attach to."

One could argue that this case can also be handled by a GUI more
effectively? :-)

> Maybe you could also have "show me more about process 3" which
> could dump a more verbose output, and then you would decide to
> attach to 3...

So, do you envision this to happen in a single command "session", or
do you envision something like what Zach talked about: a command
retaining state across sessions. I am not a fan of keeping state
across sessions as managing state between two sessions could get
tricky and IMO not worth it for the command I have in mind.