Deprecation of Intel Debugger

[Ekin_A_]

For some time, in the release notes of the Intel Fortran Composer 2013, it is indicated that the Intel Debugger will be deprecated and using GDB is advised. However, compared to Intel Debugger, GDB is far inferior. For example, it cannot access allocatable arrays in a debugging session (please see bug http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9395). And this is a bug open since 2007 without a fix but an ugly workaround. For one using a lot of allocatable variables in his code, debugging my Fortran program with GDB is like a nightmare for me. Does Intel have any plans to help fixing bugs of GDB that impedes its usability almost totally?

Thank you.

[Rob_Mueller-Albrecht]

Yes. We do have a project that looks specifically at improving Fortran debug capabilities of GDB first in Intel's own GDB distribution and then upstreaming those improvements to the GDB project as a whole. Some of this we may be able to do through feature porting from IDB, some of it has to be done anew.

I am sure the allocatable Fortran array support is already on our radar screen, but I will make sure that the specific Bugzilla you mention gets logged by our development team at Intel as well, to make sure we address it correctly.

Thanks, Rob

[Ekin_A_]

Very well explained. Thank you for also pointing the bug to the development team at Intel.

Best, Ekin

[Rob_Mueller-Albrecht · Accepted solution]

Thanks Ekin,

btw, on http://intel-gdb.github.io/ you can see some of the work we are currently doing around Fortran variable length array support. If you want to experiment with some of the repository contents and see if it already improves things for you, feel free to do so.

Best regards, Rob