[Libreoffice] Usefulness of --enable-dbgutil

[Tor Lillqvist]

Over the past month or so I have hacked, now and then, on making it
possible to build master on Windows (i.e. with MSVC) with
--enable-dbgutil, where --enable-dbgutil now means that the debugging
C/C++ runtime is used (and _DEBUG is defined when compiling, which
means that for much of the MSVC C++ library code in the headers more
thorough debugging versions of methods are used).

(If I understand correctly, in OOo --enable-dbgutil doesn't cause use
of the debugging runtime; they seem to have abandoned that idea at
some point. I didn't get the hint but still tried to...)

Now then, when I run a LO built in such a way, I get unhandled
exceptions (invalid pointer dereferences, use of uninitialised heap it
seems, for instance) when doing some very basic things, like typing a
single character into a fresh empty text document.

This is more than what I had hoped for. I had expected to at most
catch some obvious heap corruption in some rare corner case thanks to
using the debugging runtime.

Debugging this is not easy, it crashes inside the (Microsoft) C++
library (headers), in iterator related code, called by the mark code
in sw. I don't understand the implementation details of the C++
library or the sw code...

So I wonder, is this use of the debugging runtime pointless? Do we
have anybody anyway that would 1) understand the code in some specific
part of LO, in this case the mark stuff in Writer, 2) have a Windows
build and debugging environment and be willing to work in it, and 3)
understand the C++ library (the Microsoft implementation) well enough
to see what is happening...

Should I just give up and revert the changes to use _DEBUG and the
debugging runtime? Or leave that there but don't try to actually use
it any more?

--tml