Open System Services Porting Guide (G06.24+, H06.03+)

The Development Environment
Open System Services Porting Guide—520573-006
2-18
Using the Debuggers With OSS Files
Using the Debuggers With OSS Files
Three interactive symbolic debuggers are provided to enable you to isolate
programming bugs quickly. They all provide features that help you shorten the
debugging phase of a project. The debuggers are Inspect, Native Inspect, and Visual
Inspect. The debugger you choose depends on several factors, including the platform
(TNS/R or TNS/E) on which your program is running, whether the program consists of
PIC or non-PIC, and whether you wish to debug from a client workstation or on the
NonStop server. The following table shows the debuggers and the type of programs
they support:
Inspect and Native Inspect have differing commands and syntax. They are both
command-line interactive symbolic debuggers. Visual Inspect provides a PC-based
graphical user interface, which lets you execute commands and control the debugging
session through pull-down menus and dialog boxes.
Additionally, the noft (TNS/R Native Object File Tool) and enoft (TNS/E native
Object File Tool) utilities can be used on native program files for debugging options not
available with the Inspect, Native Inspect, and Visual Inspect debuggers. See Using
the noft and enoft Utilities on Native Program Files on page 2-21.
The Inspect, Native Inspect, and Visual Inspect debuggers have several features in
common: they enable you to look at your program while it is running and to debug
multiprogram applications. They track each program separately, enabling you to debug
a multiprogram application as easily as a single-program application. (Native Inspect
provides only limited support for debugging multiple programs. See the Native Inspect
Manual for details.) They allow the state of processes being debugged to be saved to a
savefile. They provides source-level access or symbolic access to your program.
Visual Inspect provides the additional advantage of enabling you to debug programs
on multiple nodes while working from a client PC. Visual Inspect is the most intuitive
and easiest to use of the symbolic debuggers and is the preferred debugger in the
TNS/E native environment.
All three debuggers support the same set of high-level commands for all of the
languages, with minor variances for language-dependent extensions. Although the
functions and names of high-level commands are uniform across all supported
languages, the parameters of several of the commands are language-dependent.
This Debugger... Is Used to Debug These Programs
Inspect TNS/R native non-PIC
G-series TNS (Guardian and OSS)
H-series TNS (Guardian)
Native Inspect TNS/E native
Visual Inspect TNS/R native PIC
TNS/E native
G-series TNS (Guardian and OSS)
H-series TNS (Guardian)