On 21 Feb 2008, at 18:56, Helmut Hartl wrote:
The advantage i see is that it should be buildable with fpc only, thus working on all supported platforms from scratch,
The second part does not follow from the first part. Debugging by definition requires interfacing with the OS at a very low level, and quite a bit of cpu-specific code.
I have some general questions to the fpc team: What do you think about the idea ?
For Mac OS X (the platform I maintain) I do not consider it worth the trouble (regular low level changes in the dynamic linker and available debugger api's, a new architecture every couple of years, changes only become know/available once a new release is out, ...).
I know that several developers are in favour for it for Linux and Windows, however.
Will some code of FPC be reusable ? (assembling / disassambling)
FPC does not contain a disassembler. You don't need an assembler in a debugger (except if you want to support live patching or so). I don't think much, if any, code from FPC would be usable (except for maybe the symbol table, although I'm not sure how easy it is to rip it out and reuse it).
Any general ideas, proposals, negative emotions ?
One general thing you have to think of is whether you only want to support Pascal, or also projects combining Pascal and code written in other languages.
What is the state of Debugging information symbol support ?
Quite good, in general. Some things which are still missing are dynamic arrays, and strings are also only a hack (although they work well with gdb).
Are there any resources beside the source ?
The dwarf specs. Jonas _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
