[fpc-devel] Debugger for FPC

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Tomas Hajny wrote:

> 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...

He gave his Debugging support to the Morfik people, so I don't see why he
could not give it to us...

Michael.