More Xcode Debugger Stupidities

October 09, 2011

Hard to believe that in a company with so much awesome technology the dev team still can't deliver a debugger that reliably shows the data in Apple's own datatypes.

I have an NSMutableDictionary with some objects in it. The type is known to the compilation unit. So what do the two debuggers show? GDB has no idea what a NSMutableDictionary is so it shows just the raw address. LLDB debugger knows that it's one of those and that it has 1 key/value pair. Other than that I look at the data and see this crap:

Example of debugger output

Of course you can do po in the output window, but even that won't actually show me the contents of the object in the dictionary.

I won't even mention debugging C++ code as that is even sadder.

Come on Apple, you seriously need to invest a bit more in the debugger team. If you didn't require me to move to Cupertino I'd be glad to spend some lifespan in making the tools better for the rest of us.