Is there a platform that has built in debugging? For the love of G-d???

[kiwi_trader]

Sierra Chart has full debugging for your dlls. Just compile with your chosen compiler (watcom default but some use ms or others) and set the debug options you want.

 

[greaterreturn]

One difficulty with debugging strategies or indicators is that you often want to step through the code to see what's happening on a specific bar.

Most debuggers internally don't have a way to set conditional break points that, for example, depend on CurrentBar > 211.

Maybe those tools you describe have a way to solve it. TickZOOM which will be released soon has a simple feature to type in a "break at bar" number to the GUI.

It then generates a conditional break point on that specific bar before any processing of any ticks or setup for that bar occurs.

Then you can set a break point in your strategy code and continue.

At that point you're stepping through code for your specific bar.

It's an extremely convenient feature just from using it myself.

Wayne

 

[Rabbitone]

The retail trading industry is in the Stone Age with utilities like debug. It will be that way until we, as a group, gang up on them. I was in IT for 35 years and today’s debugging facilities are what I used from IBM in 1968 when I coded in Fortran. A modern basic IT debug screen (IBM CICS) will step thorough each line of code and show the trader what variables have changed as code executes or at specific break points. There is little incentive for the current vendors to write this type of code since most trader are screaming for fancier display options. Any one who has programmed professionally is dumb founded when they see what programmer functions look like in trading software.

Want another example that makes them look stupid. Try and walk forward a 1000 profitable optimization settings in one these software packages.

We have only scratched the surface of what they can improve.