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Re: Windows support in GDB


Christopher Faylor wrote:

However, now that the patches are finally here, I have to say that I
sort of share Mark K's concerns.  I'm wondering if we are on a slippery
slope and (to mix a metaphor) will be subjecting gdb to a
death-by-inches as we slowly add ifdefs throughout the configury and
code.

I think it's a funny time to get concerned -- we're done. :-) There are no more cuts coming, so as long as we're not bleeding to death yet, we're not going to die. Plenty of GNU software has similar patches to support running on MinGW. GDB itself already has 2500 lines of code in win32-nat.c, some of which I would imagine is rather more opaque to POSIX programmers than anything we've added.


We made these changes with no algorithmic modifications to GDB, no perversions of its core design, etc.

What's the failure mode going to be? If a POSIX person adds a use of non-Windows function, without appropriate #ifdef, then the Windows side of things will break. At that point, assuming that people are noticing (which we will!), we'll fix that.

I certainly don't think the entire codebase will be littered with HANDLEs and ReadFileEx, or transformed into a multi-threaded application with a Windows event loop in the middle of it, or anything like that.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304


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