Wednesday, August 22, 2012

A GDB-like Debugger for Perl – Devel::Trepan


Earlier today I saw an interesting talk at a meeting of the NY Perl Mongers in which Rocky Bernstein highlighted some of his recent work creating a GDB-like debugger for Perl.  While Perl does ship with its own integrated debugger, which can be invoked with the –d switch, the Devel::Trepan module demonstrated appears to have great potential for turning into a Perl debugger that could one day rival or even exceed the current Perl debugger.  The Trepan module borrows much of its command set from the GDB debugger, which many users who have migrated to Perl from C\C++ might find helpful.  Moreover, the debugger as demonstrated, while still a work in progress, already appears to be functional enough to begin to be evaluated as a serious possibility for use in debugging tasks. This is a module that I will definitely be taking a closer look at in the near future and one that I think would be worth it for other Perl programmers to take a look at as well.  More information on the module can be found at https://github.com/rocky/Perl-Devel-Trepan. 

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