From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Jun 2 11:25:50 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from relay.nuxi.com (nuxi.cs.ucdavis.edu [169.237.7.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C80F37BC7B for ; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 11:25:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from obrien@NUXI.com) Received: from dragon.nuxi.com (nobody@relay.nuxi.com [169.237.7.38]) by relay.nuxi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA48814 for ; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 11:25:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from obrien@dragon.nuxi.com) Received: (from obrien@localhost) by dragon.nuxi.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id LAA85617 for arch@freebsd.org; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 11:25:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from obrien) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 11:25:55 -0700 From: "David O'Brien" To: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Plans to change our debugging format to DWARF2 Message-ID: <20000602112555.A85602@dragon.nuxi.com> Reply-To: obrien@NUXI.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT Organization: The NUXI BSD group X-PGP-Fingerprint: B7 4D 3E E9 11 39 5F A3 90 76 5D 69 58 D9 98 7A X-Pgp-Keyid: 34F9F9D5 Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message