Screenshots demonstrating AmigaOS4 debugging capabilities

[Rogue]

No screenshot of a Guru Meditation!

You'll get a "normal" Guru meditation requester when a program crashes (very similar to what was shown in the presentation). It's got a button "More..." which will drop you into the GUI...

I do hope the flashing red box has a colour gradient on it

No, but it glows in the dark and giggles when you touch it :-)
(Come to think of it, gradients would be cool, too)

You'll only see Guru's on deadend alerts, though.

[Rogue]

Looks promising. I hope the debug output can also be redirected to serial output to catch those annoying software failures that bring the whole system down.

Yes, you can redirect debug output through the serial port. You can also enable a builtin circular memory buffer, much like Mungfriend, that  can catch the output. There are two hooks in the kernel (getchar and putchar) that are specifically intended for that purpose.

[Rogue]

I would have missed my old friend the Guru

Same here. I like that slightly geeky aspect of AmigaOS (therefore the Grim Reaper got its name - "Crash  Requester" or something like that would be booooring :-)

[Rogue]

same thing?

It depends on what you call "Guru". In OS 4, there's three things:

- The red/orange blinking box (aka Guru Meditation)
- A plain requester stating that program X has crashed
- The Grim Reaper window.

The blinking box is still caused by Alert(), and is usually only used for desasters like a corrupted memory list and such.

The plain requester comes up when a program has crashed. It has a row of buttons like "Kill", "Reboot", and "More...". The latter will bring up the Grim Reaper window.

[Rogue]

However, now i assume that will not be possible since i assume that the end user binaries in the OS4 distribution wont be compiled with any debuging flags... correct?

Correct. Usually it's "no user servicable parts inside". There is no reason to ship binaries that have two or three times the disk consumption for the rare case that something crashes, and the user in front of the machine is sufficiently familar with a debugger to actually handle the situation.

Besides, you don't want a would-be hacker to sniff around in your shareware or commercial program for that CheckCopyProtect() or ReadKeyfile() routine :-)

No, debugging features are for developers. But I am quite sure that most developers will appreciate the feature, and most users will find that it is easier to get bug reports with meaningful content to the developer, which in turn means improved quality for software ;-)

It's a win-win situation.