Shorter answer is: choosing whatever "editor" you like, then use GDB console or a simple GDB front end to debug your application. The debuggers come with fancy IDEs such as Netbeans sucks for C/C++. I use Netbeans as my editor, and Insight and GDB console as my debugger.
With insight, you have a nice GUI and the raw power of GDB.
As soon as you get used to GDB commands, you will start to love it since you can do things you will never be able to do using an GUI. You can use even use Python as your script language if you are using GDB 7 or newer version.
Most people here paid more attentions to the "Editors" of the IDEs. However, if you are developing a large project in C/C++, you could easily spend more than 70% of your time on the "debuggers". The debuggers of the fancy IDEs are at least 10 years behind Visual Studio. For instance, Netbenas has very similar interfaces with Visual Studio. But its debugger has a number of disadvantages compared to Visual Studio.
- Very slow to display even a array with only a few hundreds of elements
- No highlighting for changed value ( By default, visual studio shows changed values in the watch windows in red)
- Very limited ability to show memory.
- You cannot modify the source code then continue to run. If a bug takes a long time to hit, you would like to change the source and apply the changes live and continue to run your application.
- You cannot change the "next statement" to run. In Visual Studio, you can use "Set Next Statement" to change how your application runs. Although this feature could crash your application if not used properly, but it will save you a lot of time. For instance, if you found the state of your application is not correct, but you do not know what caused the problems, you might want to rerun a certain region of the your source codes without restarting your application.
- No built-in support for STL such as vector, list, deque and map etc.
- No watch points. You need to have this feature, when you need to stop your application right at the point a variable is changed. Intel based computers have hardware watch points so that the watch points will not slow down your system. It might takes many hours to find some hard-to-find bugs without using watch points. "Visual Studio" calls "watch pointer" as "Data BreakPoint".
The list can be a lot longer.
I was so frustrated by the disadvantages of the Netbeans or other similar IDEs, so that I started to learn GDB itself. I found GDB itself are very powerful. GDB does not have all the "disadvantages" mentioned above. Actually, GDB is very powerful, it is even better than Visual Studio in many ways. Here I just show you a very simple example.
For instance, you have a array like:
struct IdAndValue
{
int ID;
int value;
};
IdAndValue IdAndValues[1000];
When your application stops, and you want to examine the data in IdAndValues. For instance, if you want to find the ordinals and values in the array for a particular "ID", you can create a script like the following:
define PrintVal
set $i=0
printf "ID = %d\n", $arg0
while $i<1000
if IdAndValues[$i].ID == $arg0
printf "ordinal = %d, value = %d\n", $i, IdAndValues[$i].vaue
set $i++
end
end
end
You can use all variables in your application in the current context, your own variables (in our example, it is $i), arguments passed (in our example, it is $arg0) and all GDB commands (built-in or user defined).
Use PrintVal 1 from GDB prompt to print out values for ID "1"
By the way, NetBeans does come with a GDB console, but by using the console, you could crash Netbeans. And I believe that is why the console is hidden by default in NetBeans
