Re: Move GDB to C++ ?

[Mark Kettenis <mark dot kettenis at xs4all dot nl>]

> X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org
> Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 09:13:12 -0400
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 09:42:28PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > From:  Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com>
> > > Date:  Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:10:37 +0400
> > > 
> > > I think this discussion went a bit wrong way -- trying to convince folks that
> > > *investing effort* in converting to C++ is justified. However, I don't think
> > > the proposal is about making folks not interested in C++ doing any work -- the
> > > proposal is about allowing folks who do some specific work, and want to make
> > > use of additional features C++ provides, to use those features, while not imposing
> > > significant problems on the rest of contributors.
> > 
> > Your being busy refactoring does impose a significant problem on me.
> > We are members of the same team, so how you use your time while on the
> > team is important to me.
> 
> Could you please expand on this idea?
> 
> Certainly the event of refactoring will have a big impact on all
> contributors.  That's at the moment of commit, and not before.  So if
> you think it's actively harmful, that's a different issue from the
> one Vladimir is talking about here.
> 
> GDB is a GNU project, driven by volunteers and sponsored contributors.
> And the sponsored contributors are volunteers from the perspective of
> anyone outside the sponsoring organization.  I don't understand the
> objection to other people choosing to invest effort on something, even
> if you think it's unimportant.  Volunteer projects go where their
> volunteers want to take them!
> 
> And I think one of the bit structural issues in GDB is that it's hard
> for even active volunteers to take it to new places.  I want to make
> that easier.

[ This is not directed at Daniel in particular, his message was just
  happened to be a convenient one to reply to. ]

Guys, can we please stop this!  These discussions are now taking up
almost all the time I have to hack on GDB.  I feel obliged to take
part in them because I see them as a threat for the platforms I care
about, and the way GDB is shipped on those platform.  But I really
hate it.

More concretely.  On OpenBSD we build GDB as a native debugger on all
our platforms.  Some of these platforms still use GCC 2.95.3, because
later versions are slower, have a bigger memory footprint and have
more bugs, at least as far as the C compiler is concerned.  Others use
GCC 3.3.5 for much the same reason.  This is unlikely to change soon,
especially if GCC is going to be rewritten in C++.  Rewriting GDB in
C++ is bad news for those platforms because GCC 2.95.3 is not a very
good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library.  I don't
think exception handling works reliably on all these platforms.
Things will get even slower and will probably require more memory than
some of my machines have.

I don't think it is acceptable to effectively drop support for a
platform for which there is a fairly active developer.

I'm not going to waste more of my time on this discussion.  But please
don't interpret my silence as an agreement.
 
Mark