18. Debugging Objective-C

There are two sorts of programmers; those that always write perfect code the first time, and those that really exist. If you are in the former category, you can skip this chapter. If you’re in the latter category, then there will be times when you will try running your code and discover that it doesn’t work perfectly as expected.

This is an irritating experience, but it is a lot less irritating when you can quickly fix the problem. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the techniques for spotting the cause of bugs in Objective-C programs.

Inspecting Objects

From: description.m

Most of the time, when you debug an Objective-C program, you will be using the GNU debugger (GDB), which has some built-in support for Objective-C. If you are using XCode then you are using GDB via a graphical front end. You can access the command-line interface from the Run menu. This is often useful because XCode only provides a GUI for the most common functions of the debugger, not for everything.