Re: Java debugger

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce@waitaki.otago.ac.nz>]

Adam King wrote:

>On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 03:28:37PM -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:
>
>>Adam M> Hrm, I already use cygwin's GDB. It's not the best -- if your
>>Adam M> code CALL's a NULL address you lose the stack, and the GUI is a
>>Adam M> bit lacking -- but it's better than nothing.
>>
>>The current gdb's gcj support isn't all that great.
>>Even worse, nobody is working on it :-(
>>
>
>hmm.. I currently use JSwat for most of my current java debugging
>needs - so I was wondering, is anyone working on a JPDA 
>implementation?  Would it even be possible since it's something
>I wouldn't mind giving a try adding to gcj.
>

Its something I've been thinking about too and is definatly doable, I'd 
say, with a combination of ptrace() and a DWARF2 interpreter. One 
problem is that if we wanted JPDA to be part of libgcj itself we cannot 
use or link any BFD or GDB code due to the license. But, if we can't 
live without code from those, perhaps we could make the JPDA back-end a 
separate, GPLed module which plugs in to libgcj somehow.

Then again, if we were to write the interpreter ourselves we might also 
be able to get away without using the BFD stuff, but I can imagine it 
could require a lot more work to port it to various different 
(especially non-ELF) platforms.

regards

Bryce.