[fpc-devel] Playing with archer using mingw, and dwarf2/3

[Jonas Maebe]

On 16 May 2009, at 22:22, Joost van der Sluis wrote:

> I've finally succeeded in buildin gdb-archer on windows using mingw.

Which branch did you build? "archer"? If you built "master" instead:  
that's just regular gdb cvs imported in git (used for keeping all the  
different branches in sync with gdb cvs), so in that case it's normal  
that DWARF3 barely works.

> I
> wanted to look how things are working using dwarf-3 debug info.
>
> Jonas, are there any things I could try using dwarf-3 which should not
> work using dwarf-2/stabs? Or somehing I really need Archer for?

You should be able to print dynamic arrays and ansistrings with it  
using the regular "print" command.

> There are quite a few things that don't work using -gw3, though. Like
> evaluating simple (local) variables.

That worked for me when I last tried it (that was a while ago though).  
But in general it's barely tested. There's a bunch of DWARF2 stuff  
that's overridden by DWARF3 methods (from before I ever touched  
dbgdwarf.pas), and most of the corresponding DWARF2 code has been  
significantly fixed/altered since then (e.g., debug info for classes  
and objects). So it's quite expected that currently several things  
work worse with DWARF3 than with DWARF2.

> Shall I try to make simple examples and file bug-reports?

You can, but I don't know if it's very useful at this point. No one  
has even started testing and debugging it.

> Is -gw3
> supposed to work on windows at all? (Yuri?)

There is no difference in how DWARF2 and DWARF3 are encoded at the  
assembler/object file level.


Jonas