[fpc-devel] In FPC written FPC Debugger

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Fri, 22 Feb 2008, schreef Michael Schnell:

>
>> Lack of Pascal support like with, local procedures, widestrings, dynamic 
>> arrays, properties is platform independend. Therefore all platforms would 
>> benefit.
>> 
> Are these things depending on the internal structures of GDB part and 
> informations for the executables that is needed to be used under a GIU like 
> Lazarus <or Eclipse> ) or is it just a shortcoming of the command line user 
> interface of GDB ?

The internal structures of GDB don't allow for full Dwarf support, which 
is what is needed to fully support the Pascal language. Further, GDB would 
have to be enhanced to display data types as Pascal coders expect them.

> Would it not be more appropriate to enhance GDB itself instead of setting up 
> a completely new project.

Enhancing gdb has been done several times. Basically all Pascal support by 
GDB was written by our own Pierre Muller. However, there are several 
downsides:
- GDB does not accept patches from everyone
- It takes a long time between patch submission and when people
   actually have such a gdb on their systems.
- You cannot rewrite the GDB internals as an outsider to properly support
   Dwarf and thus Pascal

> This seems to be a lot less work that "reinventing 
> the wheel". I feel that Delphi language is not the only language that offers 
> features like or similar to "local procedures, widestrings, dynamic arrays, 
> properties". So this effort should be supported by the "powers " of GDB.

You will find many people are only interrested in C. People working on 
gdb are mainly employed by embedded Linux companies of which C is the 
primary language. They don't mind someone working on Pascal support, but 
don't expect them to start acticvely working on features for other 
languages.

Daniël