I prefer Emacs GUD over the built-in GDB TUI. I actually don't understand why anyone would use the built-in TUI; you have to learn new things anyway, why not learn the Emacs interface which not only looks way better but is more reliable and has more features? The keyboard commands for the GDB TUI are even (mostly) cloned from Emacs.
But as that person in the audience says, it looks like the presenter is just not aware that the GDB TUI is a substandard version of Emacs GUD, having mostly the same keybindings.
The second half is a good combined demo of some neat GDB features though.
The biggest problem there is that you're injecting the politics of emacs into your debugging then. GUD's hooks into LLDB are still a third party package because certain parties have deemed llvm-based utilities politically inconvenient.
How is that relevant at all? LLDB is a completely different debugger. The fact that I have to download an extra package to use LLDB doesn't affect my use of GDB at all.
If LLDB eventually becomes as popular as GDB, I'm sure it will be included into core Emacs then. But I have no interest in LLDB at the moment.
And even if he was, I don't believe he ever said "If LLDB successfully replaces GDB as the most used libre debugger, even then we still shouldn't support it in Emacs". He's not insane, you know.
Personally I use the TUI, but I completely get where your coming from - the TUI is really pretty lame for all that it does compared to all that it could do.
That said, the debugging I do is all from the command-line anyway, so all I really want is a way to quickly view the assembly and registers when I break, which the TUI does quite well.
As a note - I think the person in the audience was trying to get at the fact that gdb (like tons of cli programs) uses readline() for input. readline() can be configured to use emacs or vi keybindings, with emacs the default - hence why ctrl-p and ctrl-n work. I personally use vi keybindings, so in gdb I can use ESC, and then jk to go up and down the command history.
But as that person in the audience says, it looks like the presenter is just not aware that the GDB TUI is a substandard version of Emacs GUD, having mostly the same keybindings.
The second half is a good combined demo of some neat GDB features though.