• Michelle Long (12/12) Oct 24 2018 Sometimes I have a deep nesting of a variable that I have to
• Rainer Schuetze (6/22) Oct 25 2018 This is not under control of Visual D, but it is the Visual Studio
• Michelle Long (20/44) Oct 30 2018 Imagine that VS did not keep thee view when stepping, it would be

Michelle Long <HappyDance321 gmail.com> writes:

Sometimes I have a deep nesting of a variable that I have to 
expand many times to find some member to check the variable.

Each time I debug I have to spend about 30 seconds digging in to 
the variable in the watch window.

Could Visual D remember the previous run's expansion of variables 
and attempt to auto expand them when the next debug occurs? It 
would need to scroll to whatever variable was being viewed last 
too, and not just percent window in case new variables were added.

The idea is to sort of make it so that the watch window sorta of 
changes as little as possible between runs so no time has to be 
wasted each time. It's not so bad most of the time but in some 
cases it really adds to the time to debug.

Rainer Schuetze <r.sagitario gmx.de> writes:

On 24/10/2018 20:47, Michelle Long wrote:
 Sometimes I have a deep nesting of a variable that I have to expand many
 times to find some member to check the variable.
 
 Each time I debug I have to spend about 30 seconds digging in to the
 variable in the watch window.
 
 Could Visual D remember the previous run's expansion of variables and
 attempt to auto expand them when the next debug occurs? It would need to
 scroll to whatever variable was being viewed last too, and not just
 percent window in case new variables were added.
 
 The idea is to sort of make it so that the watch window sorta of changes
 as little as possible between runs so no time has to be wasted each
 time. It's not so bad most of the time but in some cases it really adds
 to the time to debug.
 

This is not under control of Visual D, but it is the Visual Studio
Debugger Environment that keeps track of the expansion state of locals
and watch expressions. AFAICT it doesn't change it if it can reconstruct
it while stepping or running to the next breakpoint, but collapses them
if an expression cannot be evaluated in between.

Michelle Long <HappyDance321 gmail.com> writes:

On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 06:28:51 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
 On 24/10/2018 20:47, Michelle Long wrote:
 Sometimes I have a deep nesting of a variable that I have to 
 expand many times to find some member to check the variable.
 
 Each time I debug I have to spend about 30 seconds digging in 
 to the variable in the watch window.
 
 Could Visual D remember the previous run's expansion of 
 variables and attempt to auto expand them when the next debug 
 occurs? It would need to scroll to whatever variable was being 
 viewed last too, and not just percent window in case new 
 variables were added.
 
 The idea is to sort of make it so that the watch window sorta 
 of changes as little as possible between runs so no time has 
 to be wasted each time. It's not so bad most of the time but 
 in some cases it really adds to the time to debug.
 

 This is not under control of Visual D, but it is the Visual 
 Studio Debugger Environment that keeps track of the expansion 
 state of locals and watch expressions. AFAICT it doesn't change 
 it if it can reconstruct it while stepping or running to the 
 next breakpoint, but collapses them if an expression cannot be 
 evaluated in between.


Imagine that VS did not keep thee view when stepping, it would be 
a royal pain in the ass! right? Now simply apply that logic to 
re-running the program! it is still a royal pain in the ass, but 
it's just less of a pain since one generally does not re-run as 
much as they step... but it is still the same problem. In some 
cases, specially with D, re-running is required a lot more than 
other programmers and so it is more of a problem.

If VS does not expose any way to deal with this, maybe some hacks 
can be used.

In fact, maybe Visual D can create it's own debugging 
experience(although, then why not just create a new IDE? ;))

Basically create a new window(maybe a VS dockable window) that 
allows for displaying debug stuff better? I really have a need to 
display matrices in a matrix format rather than having to show 
each row one line at a time one column at a time(element wise)... 
makes it very hard to visualize information and therefore makes 
the process of debugging certain things really slow ;/

D really needs a modern IDE with futuristic advanced debugging 
abilities... far too primitive for my tastes.