Re: question about debugging Perl modules written in C with DDD

[R. Bernstein]

Peter Wainwright writes:
 > On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 12:50 -0800, Chuck Pareto wrote:
 > > Hi,
 > > I was referred to this tool (DDD) as a way to debug Perl Modules
 > > written in C. I currently use Komodo IDE to program and debug Perl and
 > > I am using a module called Text::Scan. Although I can walk through
 > > Perl scripts to debug them in Komodo, Komodo will not step through C
 > > code located within the module. I need to figure out how the c code
 > > works and I'm trying to find something that will allow me to step
 > > through the module including the c code. Can anyone tell me if DDD
 > > will accomplish this, if not does anyone know how I can do this?
 > > Thanks,
 > > Chuck
 > 
 > Anyone else tried something like this?
 > 
 > DDD can step through C code, but as far as I know, it can't step through
 > Perl in the same session.
 > 
 > As far as I know, DDD can run one underlying "inferior" debugger at a
 > time, so you can't step from Perl code into C code.  Multilanguage
 > debugging would be a nice feature.
 > 
 > However, you could try debugging the Perl interpreter with GDB as
 > inferior debugger, and setting breakpoints at the C functions you want
 > to debug.
 > 
 > Peter

See http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?ruby+live+process+introspection for
how to do this in Ruby. 

In theory the same could be done in Perl. But having looked at Perl,
Python and Ruby at the C and C API level what makes Ruby cooler for
this is Ruby's uniformity, simplicity, and transparancy here.  Not
only is Ruby more dynamic/powerful, but at the same time it is
*simpler*. Seems hard to believe, but in this regard it feels more
like LISP.