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XCode comes with LLDB, presumably there is a way to enable it as the debugger to use when debugging XCode projects.

Of course being a Linux user I have become a hardcore command-line fanatic and I have a well-established Vim and Tmux workflow. Also being a code portability freak, 100% of my scripts work on both OS X and Linux.

So is there some sort of way to "Pull out" the LLDB from deep within the bowels of XCode and run it from the command line? What are the benefits of compiling it ourselves, as directed from the instructions?

I am guessing that the usual reasons to build from source apply here as well: We can get the latest bleeding edge features and bugfixes by rebuilding it. It's just better. etc. How can I check which version of clang a particular LLDB instance uses? I did compile it using the XCode project (by following those directions), and version reports: 

steven@new-host-3:~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/lldb-bvjmzslapfdmdmabqocfcogrlbfc/Build/Products/Debug Wed 3 20:37 10137
% ./lldb
(lldb) version
lldb-300.99.0

The answer won't directly help me since I already know how to build the entire thing from source, but for everyone else out there with a Mac who is thinking about ditching GDB (and actually intends to do debugging out of a command line), maybe there's a shortcut (that I skipped)!

I guess there still is a significant difference between this bleeding edge svn-sourced manually compiled LLDB and the LLDB that Apple packages with XCode and XCode CLT.

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The convention on Mac OS X with Xcode 4.6 is that you either install the CommandLineTools package (which installs things in /usr/bin etc) or you prefix commands with xcrun. xcrun lldb, xcrun clang, etc. Most users of Xcode do not use command line tools so this arrangement works well. I believe you can download the CommandLineTools package alone if you're only doing command line development from http://developer.apple.com/ (I think an Apple ID is required to get access -- I think a free account will be sufficient to get the CommandLineTools package) which means you can get the full command line tools with a single 128MB download.

The change to have the canonical home for everything be in /Applications/Xcode.app is a relatively new one and the goal that drove this change was to make the developer tools relocatable. It will install in /Applications/Xcode.app if you download it from the Mac App Store, but it doesn't need to be there. You can install multiple versions of the tools on a single system - for instance, people who have access to the Xcode 5 Developer Previews will see that it installs in a separate location so the Xcode 4.6 tools are still present on the system. The xcode-select command line program can be used to specify which set of Xcode.app tools should be invoked by xcrun clang etc.

As an aside, a useful shortcut for people more comfortable building from Terminal: if you are building lldb you can do xcodebuild -configuration Debug and it will build the Debug configuration for you, no Xcode UI required.

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Thanks Jason. Do you think it makes sense to do what I did here, which is take the lldb Xcode project's Release product directory contents, and copy that into my documents, and then ensure it is in my $PATH?
That's fine. I don't do lots of multi-project work in Xcode so I have my Xcode prefs set so things build in /tmp/build - I can run /tmp/build/Debug/lldb directly when I want to run the lldb I'm working on without needing to copy anything around.
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Maybe I took the scenic route here.

% /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/lldb
(lldb) version
LLDB-179.6
(lldb)

This is probably useful enough to get work done with.

It's kind of unfortunate to see that the Xcode CLT and Xcode itself come with similar tools, it's a waste of disk space.

See the sister question here.

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