The Parallel Debugger plugin, originally from Parnassus, is now available in GetIt for RAD Studio 11.x (ie 11.0 and 11.1.) This follows up making Bookmarks and Navigator available a few weeks ago.
The Parallel Debugger is an addon that lets you see what’s going on in all threads in your app at once. A traditional debugger in the IDE shows only one thread, one call stack, and so forth. The plugin shows you all call stacks for all threads next to each other (ie visually parallel matching that they are running in parallel), adds markup in the editor showing where each thread is executing, color-codes threads, lets you run, step or trace into on a per-thread basis, and more. Read the original announcement blog post to see the full set of features!
Screenshot showing some of the Parallel Debugger features: parallel call stacks, coloured threads, extra editor markup, per-thread run/pause/step/trace, etc
To install, go to the Tools menu in the IDE, GetIt Package Manager, and select the IDE Plugins section in the category selector on the left. You’ll see it listed: select it and click Install.
The Parallel Debugger selected in GetIt. Note there are many other IDE addons in the same category too!
The Debugger plugin does stress the various debuggers, because each of them is doing so much more (roughly linearly increased by the number of threads in your app.) It works best on Windows, and we don’t recommend using it for remote debugging, such as for macOS. It adds a new top-level menu called Thread, and in that is a submenu ‘Feature Level’. Keep that on ‘CPU Only’ when you don’t want the Parallel Debugger heavily involved. Then turn it back on when you need to do some debugging in parallel!
We hope you find this useful, and helps you debug and understand your app’s parallel actions.
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I installed it. When I exit C++Builder 11 I get access violations and have to use Task Manager to shutdown C++Builder. So I uninstalled it. That problem then went away.
I’d love to have something like this, but admit I am a little distrustful: will I be a beta tester or is this stable software (and if so, why not part of the IDE?). Also, is it up to my application which has hundreds of thread processing gigabytes of data each second? The current debugger is almost invisible in that I hardly notice it is running. How will this plugin behave? And if I do not like it, can I safely uninstall it?
You can always safely uninstall it 🙂 If you have hundreds of threads, you may find performance slow as you step, especially as thread info is reloaded when the process pauses after a thread. Change the Feature Level (in the Thread Menu) to Selected Call Stacks so it only loads info for the threads you choose (there is a button in each thread.) You should also be aware that the debugger work is basically multiplied by the number of threads, so you may find it slow when pausing. But give it a go!
Hi, I don’t see it under the IDE plugin categories. any advice to get this parallel plugins to be installed?
Is it possible you have “updates” or some other selection ticked? Also, do you have an active update subscription because it will not be possible to install it if you do not?
This is how it appears in GetIt for my copy of RAD Studio 11.2: