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Re: Move GDB to C++ ?


Mark Kettenis wrote:
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.
I agree, seems pretty much beat to death at this point. I originally brought it up because I wanted to get a sense of where everybody was at these days. People's attitudes toward programming languages do change, but not because of mailing list discussion.
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good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library.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.
This sounds like a good litmus test actually. Either ensure that GDB continues to run, and reasonably well, on OpenBSD, or drop OpenBSD as a supported native.
I don't think it is acceptable to effectively drop support for a
platform for which there is a fairly active developer.
Perhaps you'll get some company, if C++ fans set up OpenBSD systems so as to see what language features they can expect to work. :-)

Stan


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