[Qt-creator] MPI debugger plugin

[Mohammad Mirzadeh]

Hi guys,

TL;DR how hard is it to develop parallel debugging plugin for QtCreator?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm a computational scientist and I've been using QtCreator for the
past 3-4 years and I should say It's been a very joyful experience so
far. It is almost everything that I need and expect from an IDE ...
except one thing that I have not had much luck with and that is
parallel MPI debugging.

My experience with parallel MPI debugging in QtCreator has always been
opening multiple sessions, attaching to running processors, and go
back and forth between processes manually ... which kinda works but
can easily get out of hand for more than 2-3 processes!

Indeed there are not that many parallel MPI debuggers available and
the one I know are all really expensive (in the $500-700 price range
and more). But the thing is most MPI debuggers are really just
wrappers around serial ones like gdb ... its just that they show the
result in one window and make it really easy to switch between
processes.

So after thing lengthy introduction, here is my question: For someone
like me, who is considerably comfortable with C++ but with no Qt
background, how hard is it to change the current debugger plugin so
that I could easily debug MPI programs in one window and confortably
switch between different processes? If this is doable, where should I
start?

Thanks,
Mohammad