From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Jun 2 13:33:21 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from pcnet1.pcnet.com (pcnet1.pcnet.com [204.213.232.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 971F737B51F for ; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 13:33:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from eischen@vigrid.com) Received: (from eischen@localhost) by pcnet1.pcnet.com (8.8.7/PCNet) id QAA03725; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 16:32:53 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 16:32:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Eischen To: "David O'Brien" Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Plans to change our debugging format to DWARF2 In-Reply-To: <20000602112555.A85602@dragon.nuxi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message