Hey everyone -

So I have a nice cross-platform build system, and it builds my software with CMake. Yay.

The problem is, if I want to debug my software, I typically use gdb from the command line. Boo.

I hear XCode has sweet debugging capabilities (as a gdb frontend). Is there a straightforward way to use XCode to debug a program that wasn't built as part of an XCode project?

If you want to debug from xcode, you'll need to build from xcode...

That's not true, you can use Xcode to debug an application built in another way. You'll need to create an Xcode project, a custom executable, point that custom executable at the product of the makefile, then Xcode should be able to debug it just fine. Various IDE integration features may or may not work.

Anecdotally, I find Xcode's front end to be less reliable than GDB, and since reliability is at a premium when debugging, I prefer to stick with the command-line GDB.

I dunno, the only real advantages XCode has is easily being able to set breakpoints and a nice source code browser. Half of the debugging I do in XCode is still from the "run" terminal anyway where I can easily evaluate expressions and view data structures without having to fold out a bajillion disclosure triangles. Also... as OSC says, it's much less buggy.

Thanks, guys,

If you're using CMake, why don't you generate an xcode project?