Re: RFA: Breakpoint infrastructure cleanups [0/8]

[Michael Snyder <msnyder at redhat dot com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 16:24:18 -0700
> > From: Michael Snyder <msnyder@redhat.com>
> >
> > The difference between breakpoints and watchpoints may be small,
> > but the difference between breakpoints and tracepoints is large.
>
>
> Can you elaborate?  From the user's point of view, it seems like a
> tracepoint is just a fancy variation of a breakpoint, one that
> performs a set of operations and then continues the inferior.

Debugging using tracepoints is a totally different process
than debugging with breakpoints.  It's like planning and
setting up a photo or video shoot, going away while someone
else does the filming, then coming back and looking at
the results.


> > Other potential stop-points are signals (synch and asynch),
> > throw and catch, syscalls, longjmp, synchronization, thread
> > switch, blocking...
>
>
> These are all traps we set at code and/or data to stop the executable,
> right?  So where's the big difference?

Asynchronous signals aren't like traps at all.  They're not
associated with a source location _or_ a target location.
Of course once they happen, there will be a location where
they happened -- but the next time it will be somewhere else.