Debugging STK Programs in gdb

One of the nicest aspects of working with STK programs is that all source (C++) is available, facilitating debugging. Single-stepping someone else's STK program is a very good way to learn how it works. Object oriented software is often hard to read because its functionality is spread out over many functions in many class files, some of which may be in separate libraries. Single-stepping the code in a debugger solves this problem by showing you exactly what code is being executed and in a natural order, complete with the ability to inspect variables, stack frames, and even larger data structures such as arrays, structs, and objects.

On Windows platforms, development tools such as Microsoft Visual C++ provide all the debugging support you need.

On UNIX platforms, the standard C++ debugger is gdb, and we'll look at that case below.^B.1