CGDB is a lightweight front end to GDB. It is intended to be easy to use
and quick to respond to the user. CGDB is currently stable and usable. It 
unfortunately is not very full of features. The goal is to add necessary 
features to CGDB while continuing to keep it lightweight.

CGDB is broken up into two major components. Mainly, CGDB itself and libtgdb. 
libtgdb is a library that is intended to handle the communication hurdle with 
GDB. There is two major communication possibilities when communicating with
GDB. The old annotation interface, and the new MI interface. tgdb is still
only capable of speaking the annotation protocol. This is currently why 
there is not a lot of functionality at the CGDB level. I have attempted to
implement the gdb/mi protocol by writing libgdbmi in cgdb/lib/gdbmi. I had
to modify bison to allow it to work as a push parser. In general, the 
work left on tgdb is,

  - get bison to have push parser support in next release of bison
  - test and polish libgdbmi
  - stuff libgdbmi into libtgdb. This could be by rewriting libtgdb into
    a nicer interface and then plugging in libgdbmi or by back fitting
    libgdbmi into libtgdb. Either way, the interface should be nice, and
    the annotate 2 interface needs to stay supported.
  - extend either libgdbmi or libtgdb to be available from a scripting
    language. Tcl or perl would be a good choice. This would give 
    developers an easy way to script particular functionality of GDB.

CGDB was written quickly over a period of about a year. It is obvious to 
us now that we made a trade off, which is: to get CGDB working fast instead of
designing CGDB so it could be easily extended in the future. Because of that
CGDB essentially has no window manager. A window manager is the main feature
that CGDB requires in order to better be able to easily display more 
information to the user. At this point, a programmer has no way to easily
display new types of information. The main features that are of interest
at this point are,

  - Write a new window manager for CGDB. Something that will be as flexible
    as vim's window manager. This includes, splitting horizontally and 
    vertically, and resizing.
  - Finish writing the map functionality. This is actually 90% done. With
    a little more testing of the boundary cases, and some documentation, 
    this will be done.
  - Write an interface on top of the kui that will determine exactly how
    multiple keys are bound together to form a command. That way, we can
    provide high level functionality in a bindings file. For instance,
    currently CGDB has no way to associate Ctrl-w,j to a window move 
    command. That's because it only understands one char at a time.
  - Add readline support to the status bar.
  - Move the status bar to the bottom of the window like vim does. This 
    should probably be done after the window manager is made, since there
    are multiple status bars per file.
  - Provide stack trace frame window when the new window manager is ready.
  - Provide variable display if someone is clever enough to figure out
    how to display this information in a curses window.
 
In general, the rules for hacking CGDB are

  - Rewriting code is fine, but must provide the same functionality that
    previously existed.
  - Make code easy to understand. Remember, it must pass peer review.
  - Test, Test, Test.
  - When necessary, need to provide documentation.