How to Use the Mingw Gdb Debugger to Debug a C++ Program in Windows

How do I use the MinGW gdb debugger to debug a C++ program in Windows?

The first step is to compile your program with -g to include debugging information within the executable:

g++ -g -o myprog.exe mycode.cpp

Then the program can be loaded into gdb:

gdb myprog.exe

A few commands to get you started:

break main will cause the debugger to break when main is called. You can also break on lines of code with break FILENAME:LINENO. For example, break mycode.cpp:4 breaks execution whenever the program reaches line 4 of mycode.cpp.
start starts the program. In your case, you need to set breakpoints before starting the program because it exits quickly.

At a breakpoint:

print VARNAME. That's how you print values of variables, whether local, static, or global. For example, at the for loop, you can type print temp to print out the value of the temp variable.
step This is equivalent to "step into".
next or adv +1 Advance to the next line (like "step over"). You can also advance to a specific line of a specific file with, for example, adv mycode.cpp:8.
bt Print a backtrace. This is a stack trace, essentially.
continue Exactly like a "continue" operation of a visual debugger. It causes the program execution to continue until the next break point or the program exits.

The best thing to read is the GDB users' manual.

How to debug in VS Code: Windows 10 and MinGW

1) Yes. the -g switch is all you need. Just to be clear I'm compiling my program as

gcc -g prog.c

2) Set the "externalConsole" options as "true". For some reason, this does not work when it is false. The rest seems okay.

3) I can debug just fine with only the launch.json file and nothing else

4) The second one C++ (Windows) option is for the Windows C/C++ compiler which you can install using MSBuild tools alongside Visual Studio and use the cl.exe compiler instead of gcc/g++. In case you want to try the Windows compiler, you need to compile using the -Zi switch (just like -g switch in gcc/g++) and your compilation command will be

cl -Zi path\to\prog.cpp -o a.exe

But of course, if you are using MinGW/gcc/g++ you don't need this.

I can't say for sure, but your error looks like your path to the program is not correct. Make appropriate changes in the "program" in your launch.json file just for reference my program path value is

        "program": "${workspaceFolder}/a.exe",

Here, this a.exe is located at the root of the repository/workspace of VS Code

5) Well, I'm able to debug in windows with MinGW just fine, so it should be possible.

How to use MSYS2/MINGW64 gdb to debug a program built with MSYS2/MINGW64 toolchain but not built from inside the MSYS2 shell

GNU has cross-platform toolchains. You can use those to (kind of) build and debug programs for other platforms. For simplicity, we'll concern ourselves only with gcc and gdb.

Both gcc and gdb has cross platform versions, so you can be on Linux/Windows and compile C programs for Windows/Linux. These GNU tools have compilation arguments called host and target. So you can compile gcc/gdb to run on Windows system and compile/debug programs for Linux system.

The mingw64 gdb has both target and host set up to be x86_64-w64-mingw32. So it runs on Windows system and debugs programs compiled by Mingw-w64 toolchain.

The Msys2 gdb, on the other hand, has target and host set up to be x86_64-pc-msys. So it'll only run on msys systems, which means you'll have to invoke it from inside the Msys2 shell (Otherwise it won't find the cygwin.dll and won't perform properly, if it does at all). Moreover, it can only debug programs compiled for msys systems.

In short, to debug programs compiled by Mingw-w64 toolchain, use the mingw64 gdb.

Debugging MinGW program with gdb on Windows, not terminating at assert failure

Just set a breakpoint on exit:

(gdb) b exit

Visual studio code - debbugging stopped working [gdb, mingw, windows 10]

The accepeted answer was given by olyBlackCat in the comments, which I'm quoting here to mark it as the accepted answer:

I'm seeing a lot of questions like this. Maybe try this extension instead of the default C++ one? It works for me on Linux. – HolyBlackCat Aug 16 at 17:28

Found the bug report. There's some advice there github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/7971

I am using MinGw compiler, whenever I'm trying to debug the code gets error failed. And why its location is of cygwin as I am using mingw

You will need GDB to debug code built with MinGW's gcc.

Here's a link explaining how it can be done: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/cpp-debug

Also it looks like you're using an old version (GDB 8.1 while the current version is 9.2). Check out http://winlibs.com/ for a build of the latest version of MinGW-w64 which includes GDB 9.2.

Can I use a Code::Blocks as a MinGW GDB GUI?

As a GUI tool for the debugger you could use x64dbg.
It allows you to perform both 32 and 64 bit debugging for programs built with either MinGW or Visual Studio