xspray | front end for lldb on OS X

xspray is a C++ library typically used in Xcode, macOS applications. xspray has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Weak Copyleft License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

About one year ago I took some time experimenting with creating a new GUI for lldb. My idea was to build a debugger that permits to deeply inspect data at runtime. As a developer it is often very frustrating to the IDE stop in the code and not be able to really inspect variables that are big containers (beyond a dozen of floats…). When I deal with real time audio, image processing, video, maths, etc., not having access to a more visual representation of my data often makes my life miserable. I also would like to have a complete set of tools to analyse my data: compute the average, the sum, the first derivative of a big vector of float can be life saving. So I started to toy with lldb on the Mac and I developed a prototype to see if my idea was feasible. LLDB is an absolutely amazing project (along with LLVM and Clang…) and developing a simple plotter that can inspect std::vector and std::list at runtime was relatively easy on OSX (and the answers I got to my newbie questions on the lldb-dev mailing list have been very helpful too!). Making it work with an iOS target proved much harder as there is very little documentation about how Xcode and iTunes installs application and start the debugger there. After much trial an error I succeeded to have that working too. The next idea was to build a complete GUI for LLDB that would work on Android too: native debugging on that plateform is a pure nightmare of horrible scripts and arcane command line instructions. Unfortunately lldb was not at all able to gdb-remote a linux host (even x86 gdb-remote didn’t work at all at the time) and an android debugserver implementation seemed out of question. Which is really a shame as I’m pretty sure game developers (for exemple) would love to have a full blown debugger on that platform. (and one with the features I envisioned would be really very cool…). So I stopped working on it (also I was running out of free time). Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to really touch my prototype since september 2013 as after giving the idea some thoughts I haven’t found compelling proof that I could make a living by selling this kind of software (nobody wants to launch a separate debugger from Xcode right?). But I thought it was too bad to have all that code lying there doing nothing and helping nobody. So I have decided to release this small prototype as an open source project on github: