Re: RFA/types: Clean up use of field bitsize

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com>]

> On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:41:10PM -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> 
>> >Does anyone have a comment on this patch?  If not, I'll commit it in a
>> >couple of days, after I'm added to the global write list.
>> >
>> >(The type code has no specific maintainer, the debug reader and
>> >language parts I consider obvious, and the patch is over a month old
>> >now.)
> 
>> 
>> I'm mainly wondering if we're that desperate for memory space.
>> 
>> I thought a data structure was added to GDB so that it could spot 
>> duplicate type info and, hence, keep its memory size down.
> 
> 
> If so, I don't see it.  The debug readers will create a new copy when
> they hit a new definition.

Sigh, looks depressingly like a proposal that fell flat :-(
There are bcache's for macro and psymbol stuff but not types.

> Besides, wasting memory is still bad.  And that's not the reason I did
> it, anyway:

True, the real problem is (true?) the type duplication - gdb is wasting 
memory by duplicating type information - fixing that eliminates the 
problem removing the need for a micro optomization?

Can't find the discussion :-(

>> >>The goal is to allow more kinds of fields to be marked artificial -
>> >>particularly data members.  After this patch I'll submit the followup to
>> >>mark DW_AT_artificial members as artificial types.
> 
> 
> ... in other words, moving artificial out of loc without wasting an
> additional 32 bits.

I'm definitly not questioning this.

Andrew