Visual Studio Code - C++ Debugger doesn't start

Question

I've been using Visual Studio Code to debug C++ on Linux for a while now.

In a sample project I've got the following launch.json:

{
    "name": "(gdb) Launch",
    "type": "cppdbg",
    "request": "launch",
    "program": "${workspaceFolder}/main",
    "args": [],
    "stopAtEntry": false,
    "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}",
    "environment": [],
    "externalConsole": true,
    "MIMode": "gdb",
    "setupCommands": [
        {
            "description": "Enable pretty-printing for gdb",
            "text": "-enable-pretty-printing",
            "ignoreFailures": true
        }
    ]
}

I've successfully compiled and run main.c, so debugging should work fine.

When I start the debugger, a blue loading bar appears under the arrow and nothing happens. On my laptop, with the exact same configuration, the loading bar would disappear after a couple of seconds and the debugger would start.

Looking at ps aux I can see two new processes:

1. mono.linux-x86_640 with the command /home/guyyst/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.cpptools-0.20.1/debugAdapters/mono.linux-x86_64 --config /home/guyyst/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.cpptools-0.20.1/debugAdapters/framework/config.linux /home/guyyst/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.cpptools-0.20.1/debugAdapters/bin/OpenDebugAD7.exe

2. bash with the command bash /home/guyyst/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.cpptools-0.20.1/debugAdapters/OpenDebugAD7

Debugging on my laptop spawns the same processes, but they disappear when the debugging actually starts. The two processes on my PC stick around even after closing VSCode. When I first noticed this I had 15+ copies running from previous attempts.

All of this worked fine yesterday, and I don't remember making any changes to my configuration since then.

I've tried reinstalling VSCode several times through either the AUR version visual-studio-code-bin or the open source package code.

Debugging some Python code worked just fine.

Answer 1

Turns out it was as easy as setting externalConsole in launch.json to false. Should've probably thought of trying that before.

I'm constrained to the VSCode console, which isn't that big a deal.

I still can't explain why it won't work with an external console, since that's how I'm still doing it on my laptop and used to do it on my PC too.