neovim, dap and gdb 14.1

At the beginning of December 2023 gdb version 14.1 was released. The feature I’ve waited for is support for the the Debug Adapter Protocol. Today I finally looked into this and got gdb working with nvim-dap.

If you already have setup nvim-dap, it is pretty easy to add support for C/C++ with gdb. First you need to enable DAP for the filetype. I load DAP with lazy only for filetypes I use it for.

Then I created the file plugins/dap/c.lua with the following content:

local ok, dap = pcall(require, 'dap')
if not ok then
    return
end

--
-- See
-- https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Interpreters.html
-- https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Debugger-Adapter-Protocol.html
dap.adapters.gdb = {
    id = 'gdb',
    type = 'executable',
    command = 'gdb',
    args = { '--quiet', '--interpreter=dap' },
}

dap.configurations.c = {
    {
        name = 'Run executable (GDB)',
        type = 'gdb',
        request = 'launch',
        -- This requires special handling of 'run_last', see
        -- https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap/issues/1025#issuecomment-1695852355
        program = function()
            local path = vim.fn.input({
                prompt = 'Path to executable: ',
                default = vim.fn.getcwd() .. '/',
                completion = 'file',
            })

            return (path and path ~= '') and path or dap.ABORT
        end,
    },
    {
        name = 'Run executable with arguments (GDB)',
        type = 'gdb',
        request = 'launch',
        -- This requires special handling of 'run_last', see
        -- https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap/issues/1025#issuecomment-1695852355
        program = function()
            local path = vim.fn.input({
                prompt = 'Path to executable: ',
                default = vim.fn.getcwd() .. '/',
                completion = 'file',
            })

            return (path and path ~= '') and path or dap.ABORT
        end,
        args = function()
            local args_str = vim.fn.input({
                prompt = 'Arguments: ',
            })
            return vim.split(args_str, ' +')
        end,
    },
    {
        name = 'Attach to process (GDB)',
        type = 'gdb',
        request = 'attach',
        processId = require('dap.utils').pick_process,
    },
}

And loaded it with the following snippet:

  if vim.fn.executable('gdb') == 1 then
       require('plugins.dap.c')
   end

My neovim dotfiles are here.