From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 17515 invoked by alias); 14 Jul 2008 16:34:14 -0000 Received: (qmail 17504 invoked by uid 22791); 14 Jul 2008 16:34:14 -0000 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-2.3 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,SPF_HELO_PASS,SPF_PASS X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mx1.redhat.com (HELO mx1.redhat.com) (66.187.233.31) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:33:52 +0000 Received: from int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (int-mx1.corp.redhat.com [172.16.52.254]) by mx1.redhat.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m6EGXn1K003753; Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:33:49 -0400 Received: from pobox.corp.redhat.com (pobox.corp.redhat.com [10.11.255.20]) by int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id m6EGXnTv008263; Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:33:49 -0400 Received: from opsy.redhat.com (vpn-10-42.bos.redhat.com [10.16.10.42]) by pobox.corp.redhat.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id m6EGXmuO013632; Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:33:49 -0400 Received: by opsy.redhat.com (Postfix, from userid 500) id 148B1378147; Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:33:48 -0600 (MDT) To: Daniel Jacobowitz Cc: Frysk List Subject: Re: Roadmap beginnings References: <20080711215243.GA30836@caradoc.them.org> From: Tom Tromey Reply-To: Tom Tromey X-Attribution: Tom Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:34:00 -0000 In-Reply-To: <20080711215243.GA30836@caradoc.them.org> (Daniel Jacobowitz's message of "Fri\, 11 Jul 2008 17\:52\:43 -0400") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.1 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.58 on 172.16.52.254 X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact frysk-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: frysk-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2008-q3/txt/msg00031.txt.bz2 >>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Jacobowitz writes: Thanks for your reply. Tom> * Correct expression parsing. (Though I am told this is extremely Tom> difficult to impossible in the general case.) Daniel> It does a not half bad job, and specific problems with it are fixable. Daniel> As for ultimate correctness and completeness, I have serious doubts Daniel> that it is feasible - and I also doubt it would see enough use to Daniel> justify the enormous investment. Prove me wrong and we'll merge it :-) :). I'm looking around a bit to see if I can find specifics of what is wrong. Daniel> Anyway, the trend I wanted to demonstrate: these are straightforward Daniel> incremental additions to GDB. I'll sit back now and see what else Daniel> comes up in the discussion, and if any of it has a fundamentally Daniel> different character. I'm not convinced that it will or that it won't. Thanks in particular for your comments on the particular C++ work items. I think those combined form a pretty powerful argument. There's still some unaddressed though: * Multi-process. I've seen some hints on the list that this is coming, but not enough info to really understand. This seems like something that would affect many areas -- there would seem to be challenges from the CLI on down. * Scalability to lots of shared libraries. This is tied into the above. Daniel> As Ian said in his talk, ELF is a wonderful format used by almost all Daniel> of maybe 5% of programs. If you're going to be ELF-centric, you lose Daniel> Windows and OS X native debugging - and that's a big user base, even Daniel> if not directly RH customers. Yeah, that is true. But, my understanding is that this is nevertheless not a goal for Red Hat. It isn't an anti-goal, either -- just a "don't care", so if it makes things simpler, we can drop non-ELF. Daniel> I've seen people hold CDT up as an example of this problem. I'm not Daniel> personally involved with Eclipse development, but my understanding Daniel> from others is that CDT is slow because CDT is slow, not because MI is Daniel> slow. DSF is expected to be much faster. Thanks. Tom> It would also be worth doing a bit of competitive analysis of the Tom> leading closed-source debuggers out there. Daniel> I haven't done this, but my expectation is that more of the Daniel> differentiation is in the GUI capabilities than the back end Daniel> capabilities. If you want to talk about a modern, open-source, widely Daniel> developer accessible debugger, I think you need to consider GDB + Daniel> Eclipse as a combination, not GDB alone. You can argue about what Daniel> goes after the plus sign. Dodji sent me some interesting links to totalview docs. They do seem to have a lot of additional core functionality -- process-group stuff similar to what HPD specifies, the ability to evaluate C/Fortran/asm code fragments (nice!), memory debugging (overflows, bad free calls, etc), tracepoints. Tom