Re: [PATCH:MI] Return a subset of a variable object's children

["André Pönitz" <apoenitz@trolltech.com>]

On Wednesday 30 April 2008 08:24:30 Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Nick Roberts wrote:
> > [...]
> > I was thinking that only a small number of children would ever exist
> > simultaneously.  Scrolling might make that a larger number but maybe
> > it could be arranged to delete children that go out of view.
> 
> I wonder if deleting children that are not visible is possible/desirable.

Well, I would still prefer a simple toggle that would allow me to switch off
any automatic creation of children and one-shot 'expression evaluation'
and one-shot 'children listing'.

I would expect this to be much simpler to implement on the gdb side and
gives all the flexibility needed (as far as I am concerned) on the
frontend side.

Complex containers may do all kind of funny stuff behind the debugger's
back (like reallocation, rebalancing, renumbering, moving stuff to and from
secondary memory) which a frontend might want to handle transparently.
I would not expect gdb to even be aware of that (let alone to handle(!) it).

Also, hard-wiring behaviour to certain types calls for trouble on the
frontend side. E.g. if there's a std::string member somewhere I might want
to see it as something "human readable" (-> 1 child), or a byte array
(->lots of children), or maybe a structured view if it is XML (-> some children).
So whatever behaviour is hard-wired will be wrong for  n - 1 use cases.

Regards,
Andre'