[fpc-devel] In FPC written FPC Debugger

Florian Klaempfl florian at freepascal.org
Fri Feb 22 11:24:49 CET 2008


Jonas Maebe schrieb:
> 
> On 22 Feb 2008, at 09:32, Florian Klaempfl wrote:
> 
>> GDB is written in C, even worse it is written in a 80th hackish style
>> using tons of macros. Most advanced pascal programmers can read it but
>> writing or even debugging is another matter.
> 
> It is not /that/ hard to debug 

But it is hard for people knowing C not that well but knowing pascal,
that's what I meant. Would you ever have be able to contribute to fpc if
the compiler had been written in C (yes, I did a prototype in C in '93
because I wanted a 32 Bit compiler to bootstrap :) )? Luckily enough I
got the money to buy BP7 so I could use at least PM to have enough
memory, this was before I got the idea to abuse TEMSStream to store
symbols :)

> 
>> Compiling gdb as any gcc
>> written software is a nightmare especially on non unix.
> 
> 
> On unix (at least on Linux and Mac OS X) it is trivial to compile
> (./configure ; make). 

Yes, and then you can go drinking 3 cups of coffee ;) even using a
modern machine and not considering the unix centric approach it uses. If
you've bad luck, make distclean doesn't clean everything, happens
regularily, and you need to create a patch of your changes, re-unpack
the sources and apply your patch.

> It doesn't have any unusual external dependencies,
> pretty much everything that's required is included in the gdb source
> tree itself.



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