[Bug symtab/24820] .debug_names has incorrect contents

["tromey at sourceware dot org" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24820

--- Comment #13 from Tom Tromey <tromey at sourceware dot org> ---
One last note about the size and whatnot.

To my mind, one of the biggest problems with DWARF is
that it is very difficult to read.  The new scanner,
which has acceptable-ish performance, was a pretty big
effort and we're still tracking down the occasional
data race (since threading was the only way to make it
really fast).

However, this situation seems absurd to me.  DWARF is
hard to read -- but this is due to decisions made in
the design, not really anything intrinsic to the problem area.
That is, DWARF gives us abbrevs and a generically
hierarchical structure, when really gdb (and IMO debuggers
in general) wants something different.  In theory this stuff
can be used for other things, but in practice this approach
means optimizing for these hypothetical other uses at
the expense of the 90% use case.

So, rather than putting effort into an index, whether it
be .gdb_index or .debug_names, it would be much better to
tackle this at the source and make reading cheap and easy.
(This btw is why I put off .debug_names so long, I just
had trouble getting myself over the feeling that I was
working on the wrong end of the problem.)

This is partly the idea of CTF, though they went the C-only
route and also didn't really integrate into gdb very well.

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