On Tue, 07 Jan 2003 15:54:36 -0800, Paul Hilfinger
<hilfingr@CS.Berkeley.EDU> said:
For some time, I've been meaning to ask a basic question about GDB
search strategy: for language implementations that mangle their
identifiers, the standard procedure in GDB at the moment is to
search for the demangled identifier among the demangled identifiers
of the symbol table, and to speed this search up by precomputing and
storing the demangled symbol names. Why?
We used to do that for Ada mode in GDB, but subsequently changed our
approach entirely. For Ada, we MANGLE the symbol we're searching
for and then search among the MANGLED (i.e., raw, unmodified,
warm-from- the-executable) names.
I'm curious: in Ada, what does the mangling do? In particular, how
much type info does it contain? In C++, the mangled name contains
type info for the arguments for functions; I don't see how, using
GDB's current data structures, to allow us to allow users to, say,
break on a function without requiring them to specify the types of the
arguments, if we took your approach. (Though it might be possible to
modify GDB's data structures to allow that.)
Further, the mangling is ABI dependent.