Debugging C/C++ code in Docker containers with VisualGDB

This tutorial shows how to debug applications running in Docker containers using Visual Studio and VisualGDB.

WARNING: this tutorial features older versions of Docker and VisualGDB. For more recent instructions, please refer to the following tutorials:

• Using Docker Containers to Manage Toolchains
• Building Projects with Toolchains from Docker Containers

Before we begin with the debugging part, we will show why the Docker containers are needed and how they work based on a simple example. Assume we have two Linux machines, one having glibc (Standard C library) version 2.13 and another one having glibc 2.14. Let’s create a very simple C program using the memcpy() function:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <memory.h>
 
void CopyMemory(volatile void *pDest, volatile void *pSrc, volatile int size)
{
    memcpy((void *)pDest, (void *)pSrc, (int)size);
}
 
int main()
{
    char str1[256] = "Hello", str2[sizeof(str1)];
    CopyMemory(str2, str1, sizeof(str2));
    puts(str2);
    return 0;
}

If we compile and run it on the machine with glibc 2.14, it will run properly: