Re: Support of the D programming language

[Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>]

>>>>> "Gyula" == Gyula Gubacsi <gyula.gubacsi@gmail.com> writes:

Gyula> I've contacted with Mihail however he said that the support is failing
Gyula> due to some conflict with the DWARF4. (The 3 D-specific DWARF
Gyula> extensions are overlapping with some DWARF4 extensions
Gyula> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4180).
Gyula> As this should be resolved within the compiler development community,
Gyula> I would like to get comfortable to contribute to GDB the necessary D
Gyula> specific interface. I read the development resources however I still
Gyula> feel kinda lost in the GDB dev environment, I would appreciate if
Gyula> someone could help me out with some specific blog entries or similar,
Gyula> so I could catch up faster. (For first I would like to learn how to
Gyula> add reasonable test suites for testing the D interface.)

There's no easy way to learn a lot of this stuff.
You will end up having to read a lot of code.

I looked at the bug.  For DWARF extensions, I highly recommend
coordinating with GNU and putting the extension opcodes in the GNU part
of the vendor space.  Specifically I would recommend a page on the GCC
wiki describing the extension, plus a patch to include/dwarf2.h sent to
gcc-patches.  It is also friendly to also submit a proposal to DWARF
itself.

The DWARF reader in gdb is mostly in gdb/dwarf2read.c.  Your work would
probably be here, but may spill over to other places, depending on
exactly what support is needed to handle the various extensions.

For writing test cases, there is some documentation on dejagnu on the
web; and also some gdb-specific advice on the gdb wiki.  Since D support
is new, you would probably have to do more than is usual to get the
first test case written.

Tom