[fpc-devel] In FPC written FPC Debugger

[Helmut Hartl]

Paul Ishenin wrote:
> Maybe everybody will benefit in you boys will do 1 good bicycle
> instead of 3? 

At the moment i do not see the "good" bicycle to ride on.

> I see that Martin, Daniël and Marc are working/worked on one thing -
> debugger for fpc. And now we have 3 implementation based on gdb. +
> one start of native debugger.  
> 
> And we need:
> 1. abstraction layer to use gdb or native debugger or any other
> debugger 2. program interface which can satisfy fpc ide, mse ide, and
> lazaraus ide  

Well the abstraction layer should be one feature of the native debugger,
to make it usable for projects like lazarus, mseide etc ...
At the moment i don't see gdb supporting all necessary features
(e.g. gdb does not care for pascal enough).

> Is that more difficult than fixing/reimplementing already
> fixed/implemented things? 

I am currently trying to find pros and cons, feasibility.

Usecase: I want to develop and debug on an arm target nice and productive.
The arm target has udp, or serial console, but no display and has limited mem.
My vision is as follows load: The "fpc native debugger stub" to the arm board.
Communicate with the debugger, show a nice gui on linux/win. Do your job.
The same should(could) hold for windows, linux, macos too ...

The reality now would be: 
How do i find in internet or compile the gdb
for my target ? (2 weeks) Deal with linking (2 days), Deal with libraries (3 days)
,deal with makefiles (1 day), deal with c code (1/2 day),
deal with memory shortage, deal with the poor gdb pacal support, 
deal with the poor gdb interfacing support. (priceless ;-))
Then start doing the job with limitations ...
In lazarus i have gdb/interfacing related crashes every one debugging run (making console apps for linux).
What i want to say in my firm i need 3 "experts" to set up the whole thing.
So why should i not start the project in c(++)?
Because i can write and read pascal code after 1 bottle of wodka :-)
And i vomit reading c code, as the language drives every user to win an obfuscation contest,
including me when i used it for firmware projects.

That is my motivation ...

PS: i did not had a look marc weustinks code, nor knowed about it, i will have a look soon ..

helmut