GDB users can now download version 9.1 of their fav debugger, which brings interesting additions such as a pipe command and multithreaded symbol loading to the GNU project.

The latter has been added as an experimental feature to improve performance and can be enabled by using maint set worker-threads unlimited. Usability is also meant to be enhanced by better styled commands, and the facilitation of using . in command names. Infrastructure for dash-style commands has been set up to help with things like auto completion for command line arguments.

Version 9.1 also comes with a couple of new commands, such as define-prefix, allowing users to define custom prefix commands, or with, which runs a command with the value given. Chaining commands meanwhile has been improved by the addition of | or pipe, which does its usual thing of executing a directive and sending the output to another shell command.

Apart from that, users have received more ways of controlling GDB’s print output and additional options to override some global setting.

As far as language specific enhancements go, Ada devs will now get to see task names in more places, while Fortran users can finally use breakpoints on nested functions and subroutines and query information about modules via info modules. The complete list of changes is available in the news file accompanying the release.

Those looking to build GDB 9.1 themselves should be aware that a version of make newer than 3.82 is now needed to do that. While Windows users will be pleased to learn that compiling GDB with Python 3 is now an option for them, support for Solaris 10 and debugging the Cell Broadband Engine has ceased with the current release.