Fabrice Le Fessant, Pierre Chambart

There’s currently support for debugging OCaml programs in gdb. However, that’s support’s somewhat limited. Most obvious of the limitations is the inability to introspect values. So you can see where you are in an execution, but not what’s currently being processed.

The guys at OCamlPro are working on fixing that. But instead of working on gdb, they’re building out support for lldb, the debugger that from the LLVM project and the default debugger on OS X. Of the things that they currently support—which mind you are huge improvements over gdb support&dmash;are:

• show linked modules, current module, etc.
• full display of all OCaml values (via runtime info used by the memory profiler)
• set breakpoints using unmangled OCaml names.

What needs to be done:

• execution stepper is mising line information
• localization of variables, meaning figuring out where they’re stored (registers, stack)
• need some DWARF support in the compiler

This will be open-sourced, pending code cleanup.