[fpc-devel] Dwarf3 and the encoding of classes

[Joost van der Sluis]

On Mon, 2011-01-03 at 13:38 +0100, Jonas Maebe wrote:
> On 03 Jan 2011, at 13:29, Joost van der Sluis wrote:
> 
> > This has nothing to do with gdb, but with the debug-information that  
> > fpc
> > (-gw3) generates. Now it handles classes as if they are not  
> > pointers. I
> > think that this is closer to how a class is defined in Pascal. A class
> > is (imho) not a pointer, just like an ansistring is not a pointer.  
> > After
> > all, we don't use AnObject^.Destroy....

> Also, in Delphi (and in FPC's Delphi mode) untyped pointers can be  
> automatically converted by the compiler into class types, so they are  
> quite close. I don't really see a big advantage in changing the  
> encoding of class types in the debug information, especially since  
> even now stuff like classinstance.fieldname works.

I didn't change the (Dwarf-3) encoding of class types, it already
omitted the implicit pointer. But it wasn't done properly so I fixed
that.

If we agree on this, we can change this. 

I'll see if I can find any other differences between the code that
writes the Dwarf-3 class info and the other Dwarf-formats. If we are
happy with the Dwarf-2 class debug-info, maybe the Dwarf-3 code can even
be removed.

Joost.