[fpc-devel] Debugger for FPC

[Tomas Hajny]

On Wed, March 11, 2009 10:48, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Florian Klaempfl wrote:
>> Graeme Geldenhuys schrieb:
>> >
>> > That's the problem! GDB *doesn't* support all the language features
>> > that Object Pascal offers, so some things cannot be debugged. This is
>> > not a Lazarus issue, but a limitation of GDB with the Object Pascal
>> > language.  And I have heard the comments about trying to implement new
>> > features in GDB - apparently you do NOT want to go there!
>>
>> Are you aware of the fact that Marc already started a debugger? It's
>> somewhere in the lazarus repository. It uses dwarf as debugging
>> information. dwarf is good enough for most object pascal constructs, if
>> it is missing someting, it can be probably extended (I wrote the dwarf
>> generator for FPC). I'am also willing to invest some time in a debugger
>> written in pascal because the text mode ide has to get rid of libgdb
>> because it is deprecated. Using the command line interface to integrate
>> gdb into the ide is imo no option: it is slow and I never saw a good gdb
>>  gui front end.
>
> Finally getting rid of GDB: This is VERY good news indeed :-)

Yes; if it materializes this time, that's it... ;-)

Some time ago I asked Allan Mertner about possibility of getting access to
the Virtual Pascal debugging support source code. Obviously, this wouldn't
help with the debugging format support, because VP used a proprietary
debug symbols format, but it would be probably useful for platform
integration (remember that this stuff is rather low-level and completely
platform specific!) - and VP supported debugging under all of OS/2, Win32,
Linux and DOS (using a different DPMI extender, but nevertheless)! If
there is a real working group seriously working with this, we may still
try to convince Allan to provide access to this code. I'm personally
interested and would be willing to try helping with the OS/2 part, but I
certainly don't have capacity for anything more...

Tomas