[Gambas-user] Gambas3 Debugger: Data Breakpoint

[John Anderson]

On 5/23/2021 12:28 AM, KKing wrote:
> We would like to do more but it is very time consuming to migrate 
> especially on the larger codebase programs

Oh - Yes! In my world of semiconductor process equipment systems there 
is a ton of GUI stuff still running on VB6 / VS6.  It works very well 
and our uptime is measured in years running 24/7/365 across hundreds of 
installed machines.  The code snobs like to pooh-pooh VB6 "because true 
OOP is better"...and yet VB6 is OOP in a very friendly way.  Classes 
concepts, "New As" etc are all there. And a great IDE.  We used VB6 with 
C/C++ libraries to help speed up the complex stuff and machine vision.  
With .Net came a lot of problems, and it wasn't compatible with VB6, and 
slow (Try moving back and forth from "managed" structs to unmanaged 
C-compatible structs fast)  so it was largely ignored for what we 
needed.   These days the push in a lot of wafer fabs industry is to move 
away from Win10 / WinIoT, and more towards Linux controller systems, 
especially in secure air-gapped facilities.  No outside 'Net connection 
allowed, no cloud storage...Sorry, Microsoft, AWS.  Qt's IDE is very 
good for desktop GUI design and has great documentation, but is trying 
to move away from open source these days. Xamarin/Mono is a little rough 
for what we need.  GTK is ...

That's why Gambas looks attractive to test especially for a Qt5 based 
desktop style GUI.  We have to have a seamless direct operation  C/C++ 
libraries, and it looks like Gambas can handle that too.

Right now I've got VS6 / VB6 IDE running on a Win7 VM window for 
function by function inspection, and I've brought a lot of modules over 
to Gambas side where the files have every line Remark'd to start life in 
a Gambas source file, and then I can roughly go thru line by line inside 
GamIDE to build something Gambas friendly.  The logic path is already 
well tested on our equipment so we are trying to keep overall 
functionality and logical function exactly the same as we have it in 
VB6.   We were already using Classes /  Publics anyway so a lot of it a 
simple conversion in Gambas.  Some sections of ON ERROR will get 
re-written of course.

Gambas is a little easier than a straight out conversion to Qt for a 
GUI, but we've tried it a few different ways.

Gambas has most of what we need, but a few tweaks on the debugger would 
really help - especially some sort of rudimentary "Data Breakpoint" 
feature.  Not need often, but when you need it it -really- helps.  A lot.

Thanks

-John

PS - Sorry about previous post not following the "Shove New Message 
Response UNDER" rule on this list.  I live in a world were all email 
correspondence with hundreds of colleges follows PUSH NEW MESSAGE ON 
STACK message rule (most recent always on top).  I got a a off-list 
reminder from Bruce <adamnt42 at gmail.com> (writing me an email with his 
new content response on top) that he was extremely annoyed that I forgot 
to add my new content -under- previous list message...so to anyone 
else...Apologies.  I'll try harder next time.