Writing a full-screen debugger.

[jca <jca mail phm vcu edu>]

  I've thought about writing my own little custom IDE in Gtk, most of
the functions seem simple enough: a text editor + the abililty to call
gcc thru a shell.

  But the most useful feature of IDEs, step-through-debugging, is still
elusive to me.  I don't mean a command-line gdb as in Emacs, but the
full screen walkthrough available in Rhide or the old Xwpe...

  Does anyone here know (basically) how full-screen debuggers work?

  1. Do they reference the standard Linux gdb somehow, or would their
authors have had to write new debuggers from scratch, to make
stepping-through interact with their GUI?

  2.  What is the technical principle of a debugger, is it an
interpreter that treats machine language as a sort of bytecode and runs
it in a 'virtual' environment?  Or something else?

  And...  If writing a full-screen debugger does require starting from
scratch (can't use gdb), are there some nice libraries out there with
most of the debugging functions already written?

  Thanks in advance,
  jca