Re: Gdb with Guile

[Andrew Cagney <cagney@gnu.org>]

> On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 05:32:48PM -0700, Brian McQueen wrote:
> 
>>> I was wondering if you guys had considered linking guile in with gdb to 
>>> provide the extension language functionality prior to going ahead with 
>>> MI.  With Guile it is very easy to add a lightweight, yet excellent 
>>> extension language, and it is a complementary GNU project.  I think it 
>>> would be a fun project.  That's why I'm asking - I'd like to do it 
>>> myself.  So I wonder if it was considered to be a bad idea.  How did you 
>>> arrive at MI1 and MI2?  Being quite familiar with Guile, I think it 
>>> would be a better choice.
> 
> 
> MI solves a different problem than Guile would.  MI is not an extension
> language; it is a mechanism to interact with GDB in a machine-parseable
> fashion from an external program.

Actually it does, and when MI was being architected, possibilities such 
as GUILE were very much on the mind of the designer [i.e., me :-)]

GDB is trying to head in the direction of having MI (and CLI) to be 
implemented as thin vineers over a libgdb object and set of primatives. 
  Scripting languages, such as GUILE, would either use the MI interface 
(as gdb/mi/gdb-mi.el does), or the primatives just below.  Pieces are 
slowly falling into place - observers, ui-out builder - but others such 
as async targets are still a problem.

Just beware of the now very defunct libgdb v1 that was removed some time 
ago.  The old paper http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/papers/libgdb2/ also 
contains additional background.

We've just a small matter of programming :-^.

Andrew