[fpc-devel] Maximum symbol length -- answer needed

[Sven Barth]

Am 23.06.2018 um 10:48 schrieb Jonas Maebe:
>
>>> I would propose to switch all targets to use use ansistrings for 
>>> symbol names.
>>
>> Is this the consensus?
>>
>> Personally, if I had any stake in this, I would be against it. I 
>> mean, FPC is already slower than DCC.
>
> I doubt this is a major contributor to that fact (especially since 
> implicit exception frames are disabled for the compiler binary, so 
> ansistrings don't result in extra exception frames). Additionally, 
> this hashing makes it impossible to provide debuggers with a function 
> to reverse-map function symbol names onto class/method/type-overload, 
> which is a pain.
>
> In theory, you could probably add support to debuggers to ignore the 
> symbol names and have them concatenate the class name, method name, 
> and parameter types, reproducing all the same hashing done by the 
> compiler, but in general debuggers don't do this for performance 
> reasons (so you can set breakpoints without parsing the debug 
> information of the entire binary up front). 
But aren't there output formats that do have length restrictions for 
symbol names? I take it that ELF and PE/COFF won't be problematic, but 
what about those used for OS/2, DOS, etc.?

Regards,
Sven