Best way of debigging a C extension

[Paul Moore]

On 11 Dec, 21:57, Christian Heimes <li... at cheimes.de> wrote:
> You have to build Python on your own to get debug builds. Only debug
> builds allow to do extension debugging like memory leak finding.

The trouble is, I only have mingw to build extensions, not MSVC7.1 -
so I can't build Python (and I don't know if I still have the toolkit
compiler to build with that - I certainly don't have all the pieces
installed). With Python 2.6, I guess things will be better as I have
VS2008 Express, so I can use this to build a debug Python plus my
extension. It's more work than I really want to do to go that way, but
I guess it'll work.

> You are working against the system ;)
> On Windows all extensions and shared libraries of a debug build have a
> _d suffix.

That's what I thought. I was just hoping that using a debug build of
an extension would be usable with a standard release build of Python,
as that's what will be easy for most people to set up.

Ah, well, I'll stick to printf, combined with hacking a debug build to
work with a release Python. It's ugly and unreliable, maybe, but good
enough. Maybe sometime (probably not until I'm targeting 2.6 only)
I'll set up my own debug build of Python, in a virtual machine
somewhere.

Thanks for the explanation.
Paul.