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Re: Move GDB to C++ ?
- From: Stan Shebs <stan at codesourcery dot com>
- To: Mark Kettenis <mark dot kettenis at xs4all dot nl>
- Cc: drow at false dot org, eliz at gnu dot org, vladimir at codesourcery dot com, gdb at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:02:24 -0700
- Subject: Re: Move GDB to C++ ?
- References: <487658F7.1090508@earthlink.net> <g6rl1b$t7m$1@ger.gmane.org> <ufxppopyj.fsf@gnu.org> <20080801131312.GA14712@caradoc.them.org> <200808011352.m71Dq1iY027637@brahms.sibelius.xs4all.nl>
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good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library.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