Some advice for when you're debugging code using the whizz-bang, illustrated debugger in XCode 3, and suddenly find that none of your breakpoints are triggered. XCode forgets all your breakpoints! Even plain breaks at line numbers disappear when you hit "Go". You may have some, or even all, of the following symptoms.

• The little blue indicators in source view just turn yellow (for 'pending') when the debugger loads your executable, and never go blue again.
  



• The tickbox for 'Use' in the debugger breakpoint list view, turns to a dash for half-checked.




• Attempts to set symbolic breakpoints which used to match multiple symbols don't match any symbols.




• "break info" in the gdb console doesn't list anything.

If you're anything like me, you might be muttering loudly by this point, and perhaps banging things. Cleaning the entire project, and rebuilding all the dependencies doesn't seem to help. Nonetheless there may yet be hope! In my case, setting the debugging option 'Load symbols lazily' to off, magically fixed things again. This setting is found in the IDE preference pane - XCode -> Preferences -> Debugging .

posted by cms on 2008-09-04 11:20:03