GUI to debug MPI code in Visual Studio Code

[Denis Davydov]

Dear all,

I apologise for the off-topic, but since many of you use deal.II with MPI and consequently sometimes need to debug your programs, I cross-post the information below in our group.

Developers of Cpptools plugin for Visual Studio Code[1] are considering adding support of MPI debugging with GUI using lldb/gdb.

Before committing to do this work, they want to see enough interest from community who use MPI. 

If you are interested in having this feature and potentially would give it a try if it's available, 

please leave a comment or thumbs-up a feature request on this GitHub issue page https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/1723 

p.s. I think that Visual Studio Code has potential for a good basic GUI to debug jobs with about 4-8 MPI cores, which is often enough to catch bugs.

The GUI already supports simultaneously attaching debuggers to processes (see https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_20#_node-debugging ),

so it’s only a matter of using this feature in the official C++ plugin to provide support for MPI debugging.

Regards,

Denis.

[1] a free source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS with support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, 

intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring.