Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 11:25:55 -0700 From: "David O'Brien" <obrien@NUXI.com> To: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Plans to change our debugging format to DWARF2 Message-ID: <20000602112555.A85602@dragon.nuxi.com>
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The GDB developers have encourage me to change our native debugging
format from STABS to DWARF2 (for ELF binaries). This is your chance to
comment before I make my decision.
From a GDB person:
STABS just wasn't made to do what it's being hacked around to do
right now. Fer instance, C++ support in stabs really just isn't
there in GDB. The fact that operator overloading works at all in
stabs+gdb, is due to a hack. DWARF2 has clear technical superiority
over STABS, though STABS has more political clout, and more
implementations. The STABS implementation in gcc is more mature than
the dwarf2 implementation. In fact, DWARF2 even allows for debugging
of frame-pointerless code, though we don't grok the unwind info yet
(it's on my list). As you can imagine, C++ in gdb works about 50x
better with dwarf2 than with stabs in actuality. Things like inline
functions, etc, work properly in DWARF2, and don't in stabs. So, in
simple terms, dwarf2 is just much more flexible than stabs. If you
need to do C++ at all, i would really go with DWARF2, the more that
do, the sooner i don't have to deal with bug reports of bugs that
just work when you use DWARF2, and I have to hack around in GDB to
make work with STABS.
--
-- David (obrien@NUXI.com)
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