I realize that most of us Parrot developers are just about always knee deep in 1's and 0's but if you think you can spend some time to help a struggling GSoC student work on his debugger, I would really appreciate it. The adventures of HBDB has reached a bit of a stalemate. The clock is ticking and I'm really starting to feel the pressure since my debugger still doesn't really do anything useful.
If you haven't already, please read my latest blog post<http://parrot.org/content/hbdb-closed-construction-please-use-detour>. It describes most of the problems I'm facing. My biggest problem right now is basic execution commands like 'run' and 'step'. They work by manipulating a few status bits in a global bitmask and then the runcore checks the bitmask to decide how and if execution should resume. The 'run' command works just fine but the 'step' command has just been completely out of control. I tried creating a special HBDB_STEP flag which works but apparently there are several instructions that are executed before the first line in the :main function so you must 'step' 4-5 times before an actual opcode is reached. I've also considered taking the traditional route by simply placing a temporary breakpoint at the next instruction but if you've been reading any of my blog posts, you'll know that breakpoints have been a complete nightmare. Besides that, getting the next pc value is not that easy because it is not sequential; if pc is 41, pc++ is not guaranteed to be 42. Should any of you decide to help I suggest you look in the following places on the soh-cah-toa/hbdb branch: - src/hbdb.c : hbdb_cmd_step() : +724 - src/runcore/cores.c : runops_hbdb_core() : +799 - src/hbdb.c : hbdb_check_breakpoint() : +770 - src/hbdb.c : hbdb_runloop() : +1105 I'm also struggling with the 'quit' command. Ever since the merge into master, it segfaults and crashes. If you want to take a crack at it, look at: - src/hbdb.c : hbdb_cmd_quit() : +676 - src/hbdb.c : hbdb_start() : +1139 - src/hbdb.c : hbdb_runloop() : +1105 I've been on my own here for a while so I would be very grateful if some of you would be willing to give a helping hand. -- - Kevin Polulak (soh_cah_toa)
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