Re: [rfc] struct dictionary

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com>]

> On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:31:35 -0400, Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com> said:
> 
> 
>> Ok, humor me ...
>> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb/2003-04/msg00017.html why even
>> build these data structures during symbol reading?  It takes time
>> and space, yet is probably never used.  Why not on-demand build this
>> dictionary specialized for the block?
> 
> 
> That sounds great to me if we can get it to work.  It's certainly
> another reason to try to get the symbol lookup stuff abstracted behind
> an opaque interface: it makes lazy loading of data a lot easier.

But which interface?

A block has a language, and [I think] it's the language that, in the end 
decides that block's name->symbol lookup strategy.  The language can, on 
demand, build a dictionary for its block.

> About the mdebugread stuff: personally, I don't care about it in the
> slightest, so I'm happy for its performance to degrade, and it seems
> little-enough used that a 2x degradation is perfectly acceptable.
> After all, if anybody really cares about it, there's an easy fix:
> buildsym-ify it, so that it uses the same mechanisms everybody else
> does.  Having said that, I've already done the work on my branch to
> convert it to an efficient dictionary mechanism (using a combination
> of hashed and unsorted linear representations); it really wasn't all
> that much work.

The alternative being simplify it, and then let the Java/C++ languages 
implement the searching schema that they need.

Andrew