DDD was taught to me when in University, 20 years ago, and it already felt clunky, my views are now much more moderate but Motif still feels like an eyesore.
Conversations over the years have shown me that DDD was a great inverse marketing tool, ironically pushing developers towards the embedded debugger UI in their favorite IDEs... despite DDD itself being indeed very powerful. But even "usefulness over aesthetics" has its limits!
There's one DDD feature that I haven't found elsewhere: its graphical representation of a struct and its contents. You can double-click on a pointer field and then it draws whatever that field pointed to, with a nice arrow connecting the two.
I've found it a very powerful yet compact way to visualize the state of a program when debugging.
There was even a story, that (at least for Common Lisp), you can start from almost blank state, but have an exception handler installed (that can continue), so as you go you live-edit and add pieces missing, or if code crashes change.
This is all good, until nowadays, where you really want to know what's deployed in production, and not just the last stuff I've live fixed.
I mean, I guess both have values tbh, but hard to pull two models like this and use... bit like - debugger or printf statements (or both!)
Current DDD under the updated OpenMotif with TTF fonts can look much better than it did in the 90's and 00's, miles ahead than LessTif/former propietary Motif. It blends perfectly with
EMWM where I have Liberation Sans/Mono for almost everything.
Since the article was written, the maintainers fixed the issues I pointed out. No need for many of those workarounds now. Versions 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 are substantial.
Is there any URL that lists what's new in v3.4.0 and v3.4.1?
The DDD website ( https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ ) points to the source tar.gz and the full manual, but nothing that says "What's New" in recent versions.
Might not be as direct as you'd like, but all well managed¹ GNU projects ship a NEWS file in their tarball. In this case you can also read it from savannah² without fetching the tarball.
For me it reminds me of Insight, which was my favorite GDB front-end and worked great on Windows back in the cygwin era. Unfortunately it's definitely no longer maintained. https://sourceware.org/insight/screenshots.php (Well, I guess someone did rescue it to put it on github and do some work: https://github.com/antony-jr/insight )
DDD is great. I still use it, but I am a fossil. I sought out DDD when I was looking for something similar to dbxtool, which I used on the early Sun Microsystems machines. Folks today are spoiled with things such as Source Level Debugging.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Display_Debugger
2 https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/