High-Level Debugging Facilities and Interfaces: Design and Developement of a Debug-Oriented I.D.E.

While debugging in general is an essential part of the development cycle, debuggers have not themselves evolved over the years as other development tools have through the advancement of Integrated Development Environments. In this free-software research project we propose a way to overcome this problem by introducing, designing and developing a high-level debugging system.High-Level debugging systems are systems that integrate a source level debugger with other technologies as to extent both the facilities and the interfaces of the debugging cycle. We designed and developed such a system in a debugging-centric IDE, Misha. Misha, introduces among other things: syntax-aware navigation, data-displaying and editing, reverse execution, debugging scripting and inter-language evaluation through the integration of its source-level debugger (gdb) with a full-fledged source parser, data visualisation tools and other free software technologies.