How to debug the forest?

[Mikael Morin]

Le 16/09/2025 à 21:07, Harald Anlauf a écrit :
> Hi All,
> 
> when trying to debug the gfortran frontend, I often get lost in the
> forest: too much forest, trees everywhere, leaves, ...
> 
> OK, seriously, what is an efficient way to debug under e.g. gdb,
> when there is code that uses macros on trees, like TREE_TYPE ()
> etc., without losing your sanity?
> 
> I do know that there exists e.g. debug_tree, but this can dump a lot
> of stuff on me.  And the comment at the top of gcc/print-tree.cc:
> 
> /* Prints out tree in human readable form - GCC
> 
> makes me feel non-human.  :-(
> 
> I was now thinking of writing helper functions, like:
> 
I tend to use debug_generic_expr which is enough in the majority of cases.
There is a .gdbinit file in build/gcc that you can source in your gdb 
session.  It loads many shortcuts most of them coming from the template 
gcc/gdbinit.in (have a look there, you may find some useful).

Otherwise I use the full data references which I pick from the macro 
definitions.  Not human-enough may be.