Currently Nana works with the GNU GDB debugger which is available on a wide range of platforms including embedded systems and even provides support for remote debugging. Porting to any reasonable debugger with conditional breakpoints and commands is not very difficult.
As an example of an unreasonable debugger, Nana has been ported to
work with the MicroSoft Codeview debugger. The port is small (60 lines of
code) but suffers from a problem with variable scoping in Codeview. If
a breakpoint is set at a point in the code the expressions are not
evaluated from that particular scope. For example setting a breakpoint
in the function f cannot access a variable local to f
directly. Codeview has a unique (expletive deleted) scope operator
which you must use to set the scope `{...}'. This makes the
interface somewhat less than beautiful.
Another good thing about CodeView is to try a debug command which prints a message which contains a single open `{'. This of course causes it to hang and was the main problem during the porting to CodeView which took a whole day(2).
If anyone is interested I may release the CodeView implementation, please contact me if you are interested. Of course a better bet is probably to move to the `gdbserver' system. I think `gdb' has been released as a native even for some MicroSoft operating systems.
Other debuggers like DBX don't seem to be worth the trouble since gdb works on those machines. A redesign of the nana internals may also be useful if we decide portability between debuggers is actually useful.
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