Sometimes, you may find it necessary to debug Guile applications at the
C level. Doing so can be tedious, in particular because the debugger is
oblivious to Guile’s SCM type, and thus unable to display
SCM values in any meaningful way:
(gdb) frame #0 scm_display (obj=0xf04310, port=0x6f9f30) at print.c:1437
To address that, Guile comes with an extension of the GNU Debugger (GDB)
that contains a “pretty-printer” for SCM values. With this GDB
extension, the C frame in the example above shows up like this:
(gdb) frame
#0 scm_display (obj=("hello" GDB!), port=#<port file 6f9f30>) at print.c:1437
Here GDB was able to decode the list pointed to by obj, and to print it using Scheme’s read syntax.
That extension is a .scm file installed alongside the
libguile shared library. When GDB 7.8 or later is installed and
compiled with support for extensions written in Guile, the extension is
automatically loaded when debugging a program linked against
libguile (see Auto-loading in Debugging with GDB). Note
that the directory where libguile is installed must be among
GDB’s auto-loading “safe directories” (see Auto-loading safe
path in Debugging with GDB).