[fpc-devel] Status and ideas about debug info (stabs, dwarf / dwar3)

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 13 September 2011 17:10, Juha Manninen wrote:
>
> Graeme, are you working on Duby or some new debugger?

I'm working on Duby, but all changes are local to my system. I don't
have commit rights to Duby on SourceForge - though I never asked.

I'm also not sure if the original author of duby would accept my
changes, as our goals might be slightly different. eg: I don't need
Delphi and FPC support (only FPC should do), I don't need STABS and
DWARF (only DWARF should do), I prefer compiler mode objfpc (not mode
delphi), I changed some UnicodeString and WideString references to
String (ansistring), lots of code cleanup, code reformatting and many
fixes for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux. I also prefer Git to SubVersion
(but this is not critical).

The original Duby author hasn't made any commits in a long time either
(I think none in the last year), so not sure if he is still motivated
with the project. If he isn't interested, I'll simply fork the project
and continue, or take over the maintenance of the original project.


> I found your old mails that mentioned a Sybil debugger.

I did look at that, but unfortunately the Sybil debugger (and
compiler) is a closed-source. Only the RTL, IDE and documentation was
open-sourced. So the Open Sybil and WDSybil projects are pretty
screwed as far as I'm concerned.


> Another debugger, maybe fp-debugger, was also mentioned somewhere.

Duby is somewhat based on the fpdebug project located in the Lazarus
tree - mainly just the command line interface code. fpdebug is a
64-bit windows only debugger (and no idea why it is actually in the
Lazarus tree). Duby so far supports Linux, Windows and Mac, and is
designed to only use the debug information produced by the compiler.

I'm only working on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux at the moment, but once I
have more functionality working on one platform, then I'll start
testing on the other platforms too. But I'll obviously try and be
platform neutral as far as possible.

I'm learning as I go, because my knowledge of debuggers and DWARF is
very limited - but it's quite interesting to get an understanding of
what's happens behind the scenes. :)


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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