Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 16:32:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Eischen <eischen@vigrid.com> To: "David O'Brien" <obrien@NUXI.com> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Plans to change our debugging format to DWARF2 Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.1000602162611.2841A-100000@pcnet1.pcnet.com> In-Reply-To: <20000602112555.A85602@dragon.nuxi.com>
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On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, David O'Brien wrote:
> 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
^^^^^ dwarf2?
> the dwarf2 implementation.
^^^^^^ STABS?
> 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.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
--
Dan Eischen
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