XCode debugger sucks; alternatives? [closed]

Question

I've been programming on the Mac since I was a little kid using THINK C. I've never had to use a debugger as bad as the one that comes with XCode.

• It's unresponsive, and bogs down further and becomes unstable when watching more variables.
• When it crashes, I lose undo history for my sources because it's integrated with the editor.
• It doesn't benefit from integration, though, as the source viewer is unusable for stepping: Trying to select a line by clicking on the left margin makes a button appear from nowhere which causes to program to continue to that line, in the editor window, which shouldn't relate to debugging in the first place. Horrible UI and horrible implementation.
• A hobbled pretty-data "summary" syntax which can't send an object to the Expressions window.
• he Expressions window isn't aware of any kind of context, ever.
• Can't select a particular thread to debug, far as I can tell, and doesn't jump to the thread that called abort().

The kernel debugger for Mac OS 9 was better than this. It's time to give up.

What standalone front-ends for GDB work on OS X? I found http://ddd.darwinports.com/ but it's hard to find praise or anecdotes for it, or other alternatives.

Support for STL containers is a big plus for me. I couldn't care less about Objective-C or Apple-anything.

Answer 1

I tend to use valgrind for memory related errors; gdb (in a teminal) when I want a backtrace; and logging + couts for all else (if it's not crashing, and there's no memory corruption, the bug seems easier).

Admittedtely, no idea how to debug multi threaded code.