Discussion on D support in gdb

[Martin Nowak]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:18:47 +0100, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in:
>
> http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2011-11/msg00066.html
>
>
>
> Andrei

I think we should follow Tom Tromney's proposal to add the extensions
under the GNU vendor space, i.e. prefix them with 0x41xx.
Numbers hopefully don't fall under licensing issues.

It should be fairly straightforward to improve gdb debugging support given  
that
changes are accepted on either side. The GDB codebase is a slightly  
unfriendly
environment but getting rid of 'p ((char*[2])str)[1]' would be great.

I would volunteer to do the implementation but it would be great if  
someone helped with
clarifying the following issues.

  - Can we slowly start to acquire DWARF-3/4?

  - Why were extensions chosen over say representing an array as two field  
struct?

  - There is this request by Robert Clipsham  
http://dwarfstd.org/ShowIssue.php?issue=100504.1.
    What's the state of this, it wouldn't be needed any longer.

  - We should contact http://www.zero-bugs.com, it is said to support the
    dwarf extensions and would need to be changed.

  - Find out who else is affected by changing the current extensions.

  - Fixing the D-ABI specification.

  - Are there other DWARF debuggers that we should take into account?

  - Adding a page to GNU wiki describing the D extensions.

  - We could probably use DW_TAG_GNU_template_parameter_pack for variadic  
template arguments.
    http://wiki.dwarfstd.org/index.php?title=C%2B%2B0x:_Variadic_templates

martin