Re: [RFC] regresssion(internal-error) printing subprogram argument

[Pedro Alves <palves at redhat dot com>]

On 01/29/2018 10:38 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>> Indeed, looks like I don't have that.  I have "interfacesS".
>> I've attached the whole file.
> 
> That explains it :).
> 
>> So it may be that we still need to add another special case
>> for Ada somewhere.  Would old GDB from before the C++
>> wildmatching pass this test for you?
> 
> I went binary searching for the source of the regression and
> when I found that it was "caused" by the change requiring variables
> without debugging information to be cast before they can be printed,
> I gently head-slapped myself, adjusted the testcase to use something
> other than an integer variable, and voila - even GDB 7.10 suffers
> from the problem.  We just didn't see it for integer variables simply
> because we were lucky!
> 
> I ran out of time again today, but at least the WIP patch got
> augmented with a testcase that currently fails before the patch
> is applied.
> 
> I think the patch itself is probably correct, although I'd like
> to do some archeology to understand the comment attached to
> that location. I'm pretty confused by it, when we could simply
> say that symbols from languages that do not follow the C++ mangling
> should not be demangled by gdb_demangle -- at least for as long
> as gdb_demangle is equivalent to cplusplus_demangle in practice...

Yeah, the commentary around that code isn't exactly clear.
Why doesn't that code use language->la_demangle instead,
for example.

The other day I noticed that gdb_demangle -> bfd_demangle ->
cplus_demangle does have support for demangling other languages.
For Ada, see the GNAT_DEMANGLING handling in
libiberty.c:cplus-dem.c:cplus_demangle, which takes you to:

 /* Demangle ada names.  The encoding is documented in gcc/ada/exp_dbug.ads.  */

 char *
 ada_demangle (const char *mangled, int option ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED)
 {


When I saw that, I wondered why is it that GDB has a separate
implementation of Ada decoding in gdb/ada-lang.c.  The only plausible
explanation I came up with is that gdb's version decodes into a
buffer that is shared between invocations while libiberty's version
always heap-allocates the result.  Maybe it was an efficiency thing?
Do you know?

I ran into that around this discussion
<https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2017-11/msg00029.html> where I
was wondering whether we could speed up demangling by letting
bfd_demangle / cplus_demangle try all languages and return back
which one worked:

 ~~~
 An idea I had would be to try to combine most the language_sniff_from_mangled_name
 implementations in one call, by deferring to cplus_demangle which seems
 like could take care of gnu v3, rust, java, gnat, dlang and old C++ mangling
 schemes all at once.  This would avoid the overhead of gdb_demangle and
 bfd_demangle for each language-specific demangling call, at least.  Not sure.
 ~~~

Because ada_decode comes up high in profiles today...

> 
> And just as a reminder for myself, I said in my other email
> last week that I wanted also to review all the calls to gdb_demangle.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves