Feature request: Make stepping in the debugger faster

Feature Request

I am using VSCode and cpptools extension to debug Linux programs via GDB. As you know, GDB-MI protocol can be pretty chatty, and if a program is running a lot of threads or there are a bunch of pretty-printed variables in the scope then stepping in the UI debugger can slow down to a crawl. This especially became apparent in recent versions of the extension, was not prominent a year or two ago. I would like to suggest to speed this up for the most common case where there are no breakpoints or any other debug events happening while stepping over lines of code. What you could do is defer querying the GDB (or any other debugger for that matter) for local variables and other data if user is stepping through the code fast enough (say, below some configurable threshold value). That would make stepping through the code feel way faster. I believe Microsoft Intellitrace is using a similar technique. Another thing could be to load other thread's data on demand when they are expanded in UI.

No files, tests, or entry points are identified. Start by tracing how cpptools handles GDB-MI stepping, local-variable queries, and thread data in the VS Code debugger; done would require an agreed design and implementation for deferred or on-demand data loading, including the configurable threshold.