GDB does so much cool. It just sucks that it's missing a high quality front-end. I know there are a bunch out there, but they all seem pretty janky and get confused a lot; I just want a really serious group of people (some Red Hat people for example) to make a high quality native debugging app which properly speaks the GDB protocol and handles all the edge cases.

(And no, I don't want it integrated into an IDE.)

What I would love is also to be able to set python breakpoints from gdb. And integration with rr, so I could reverse-continue to said breakpoints. And ponies.

Wow, that's pretty amazing. I wonder how it's implemented, and if there are any tutorials on implementing something similar, for programming language designers/creators.

Theres also Py Spy, a profiling tool that can generate flame charts containing a mix of python and C (or C++) calls.

https://github.com/benfred/py-spy

It's worked really well for my needs

py-spy also makes it very easy to scrape from existing processes, which is invaluable if you are e.g. ever trying to diagnose a deadlock

I think it uses gdb's frame filter API: https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Writing-a-Frame-Fi...

GDB itself is fully scriptable in Python:

https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Pytho...

This has been packaged as Tools/gdb/libpython.py lately.

From https://github.com/jupyterlab/debugger/issues/284 en ENH: Mixed Python/C debugging (GDB,) #284

> "Users can do [mixed mode] debugging with GDB (and/or other debuggers) and log the session in a notebook; in particular in order to teach.

> Your question is specifically about IDEs with support for mixed-mode debugging (with gdb), so I went looking for an answer:

> https://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb (which is not responsive and almost unreadable on a mobile device) links to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/EasierPythonDebuggin... , which mentions the py-list, py-up and py-down, py-bt, py-print, and py-locals GDB commands that are also described in * https://devguide.python.org/gdb/ *

> https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDebuggingTools Ctrl-F "gdb" mentions: DDD, pyclewn (vim), trepan3k (which is gdb-like and supports breaking at c-line and also handles bytecode disassembly)

> Apparently, GHIDRA does not have a debugger but there is a plugin for following along with gdb in ghidra called https://github.com/Comsecuris/gdbghidra [...] https://github.com/Comsecuris/gdbghidra/blob/master/data/gdb... (zero dependencies)

> https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/... lists a number of GUIs for GDB; including voltronnn:

>> There's Voltron, which is an extensible Python debugger UI that supports LLDB, GDB, VDB, and WinDbg/CDB (via PyKD) and runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. For the first three it supports x86, x86_64, and arm with even arm64 support for lldb while adding even powerpc support for gdb. https://github.com/snare/voltron

> "The GDB Python API" https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/11/10/gdb-python-api... describes the GDB Python API.

> https://pythonextensionpatterns.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deb... may be helpful [for writing-a-c-function-to-call-any-python-unit-test]

> The GDB Python API docs: https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html

> The devguide gdb page may be the place to list IDEs with support for mixed-mode debugging of Python and C/C++/Cython specifically with gdb?

These days, we have CFFI and Apache Arrow for C+Python etc.

https://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb lists the GDB debugging symbol packages for various distros

FWIU Fedora GDB now optionally automatically installs debug syms; from attempting to debug TuxMath SDL with GDB before just installing the Flatpak.

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2021/09/08/debugging-... (2021) describes more recent efforts to improve Python debugging with c extensions