Re: RFC: printing pointers to global (data) variable on Windows...

Joel Brobecker
2012-08-16T22:45:41Z

> I think the reason for this is here:
>
> http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2012-04/msg00175.html

Thanks for the pointer!

> Joel> My second question is regarding the fact that we looking symbols for
> Joel> functions only. This probably made sense if the function was used for
> Joel> text addresses (like disass), but does it now? Or perhaps it's the
> Joel> GNU/Linux output that should be fixed, and only text symbols should
> Joel> be printed when printing addresses (somehow, I do not think that this
> Joel> would be right).
>
> IIRC the full symbol tables only record address information for text
> symbols, not for data symbols. If so, one cannot do this lookup.

I do not understand this part, though. Searches by name should return
global variables too, no?

> Ok, horrible idea. Perhaps some flag bit on the minsym instead?
> Or on the objfile?

You mean, setting a flag that allows us to know that sizes are not
available, and thus avoid the heuristics/filtering? I wish we could
have consistent behavior instead, but that might not be achievable.
I thought about setting the size to -1, but that would open its own
can of worms, I imagine, and that's not doable either, because the
symbol size is an unsigned value (as it should be, if you ask me).
Looking at the definition of struct minimal_symbol, it looks like
we'd have some room for an extra flag. But I am not sure I really
want to go that way. The filtering wouldn't be a problem if we were
searching for all global symbols, not just functions.

--
Joel