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QtDD12 - Domain Specific Debugging Tools - Volker Krause

836 views · Published 11 December 2012 · 59:06 · Indexed 24 September 2026

Channel: Qt Group · 2012 · Education

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Recorded at the Qt Developer Days in Berlin in 2012.
Slides available at http://qtconference.kdab.com/node/25

Using (or creating) more and more abstract frameworks allows us to implement complex tasks quickly and efficiently. However, debugging code using such frameworks with conventional instruction-level debuggers can be cumbersome, making it easy to get lost in implementation details of the framework. Domain specific debugging tools that understand the abstraction level help keep the overview.

Debugging a QAbstractItemModel with GDB or following the chain of events in an application using asynchronous QIODevices demonstrates the very low-level view that instruction-level debuggers provide. Faced with this, developers often fall back to other approaches, such as classical printf debugging. While simple and effective, this requires code modification, re-compiling, and worse, the same thing every time the same problem appears. Instead, domain specific debuggers allow developers to avoid this manual instrumentation while providing more powerful methods for visualization and analysis than stderr usually can.

This talk will present a number of higher-level debugging tools already available for Qt, starting from simple QObject introspection up to monitoring state machines or inter-process communication. More importantly, we will look at ways to create debugging utilities for your own Qt-based applications or frameworks.

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