Question regarding exporting data type information during compilation

Question regarding exporting data type information during compilation

[Michael Bauer]

I have a question regarding the ability to export data type information during compilation.  In a nutshell, I need to generate a list of all of my static variable names and their primitive data type.  When I say primitive type I mean like long, short, unsigned long, unsigned short, float, and char.

Knowing that some part of the compiler (pre-processor I think) is already parsing data type to give warnings for type mismatch, I presume that the compiler may have such a functionality already built in.  Essentially I want to export the symbol type information from the compiler.  

Now I know that I can get the symbol names in the map file along with their base address and size.  However, that wont give me the primitive type information.  I have done some searching but have not had much luck.  Does anyone know of an option in the compiler to output this information?  Perhaps there are options to control if this information is output in the map file or something.

Another thought that I had, if the compiler is not capable of outputting this information, then perhaps there is some debug information file that I could write a script to parse.  I'm thinking that debuggers somehow know the symbol name, address, and type so it must be output into some sort of debugging file.  If anyone has any suggestions I would be much appreciative.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Mike

Re: Question regarding exporting data type information during compilation

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Michael Bauer <mvbauer@gmail.com> writes:

> Another thought that I had, if the compiler is not capable of
> outputting this information, then perhaps there is some debug
> information file that I could write a script to parse.  I'm thinking
> that debuggers somehow know the symbol name, address, and type so it
> must be output into some sort of debugging file.  If anyone has any
> suggestions I would be much appreciative.

You can use readelf --debug-dump to dump all sorts of information
about the debugging information.

The compiler won't dump it for you, unless you count looking at the
assembler output when using -S -dA.

Ian