The debugger engine does not work with modern versions of GDB.

It's been the case since about version 9.? of GDB that the MI debugger engine does not work with GDB. I believe that this is because the debugger engine is expecting the wrong output from GDB, but there are numerous posts about this on sites like StackOverflow, and the only solution people have found is to downgrade their version of GDB.

The error from this is:

ERROR: Unable to start debugging. Unexpected GDB output from command "-exec-run". During startup program exited with code 0xc0000135.

I mentioned this previously here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/7706#issuecomment-1111801531

I'm attaching the debugger output with engineLogging and traceResponse enabled, but ultimately I'd suggest simply trying to use the debugging engine with GDB with externalConsole set to false and seeing for yourself. The debugger runs normally until the debugging engine gives up on it because of a perceived invalid output.

Versions I'm using:

C/C++ v1.15.1 Pre-Release
C/C++ Extension Pack v1.3.0
Visual Studio Code 1.76.2
GNU gdb (GDB) 13.1

debugger_output.txt

Start by reproducing the failure with GDB 13.1, Visual Studio Code, and externalConsole set to false. Inspect the attached debugger_output.txt and the MI response around -exec-run to identify why the engine rejects the output. Done means debugging starts successfully with modern GDB versions without requiring a downgrade.