Re: [RFC] Trivialize objc-lang.c FETCH_ARGUMENT

Michael Snyder
2003-04-23T02:06:20Z

Adam Fedor wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, April 22, 2003, at 07:41 PM, Michael Snyder wrote:
>
> > Adam Fedor wrote:
> >>
> >> Well, I thought I'd at least try to see if this patch would be ok.
> >> Here
> >> I replace the arcitecture dependant FETCH_ARGUMENT with a trivial
> >> implementation that does nothing. This would allow objc-lang.o to be
> >> linked into gdb and I commit most or all of the remaining Objective-C
> >> patches. Then I could work on fixing FETCH_ARGUMENT at my leasure...
> >
> > That seems reasonable. By the way, if there's been an ongoing
> > discussion,
> > I haven't followed it. Why is it that you need to do this in an
> > architecture-dependent way? GDB should have enough debug info to
> > do this cleanly, shouldn't it?
> >
> It's possible, although these particular functions are in the Apple
> runtime and highly optimized, possibly in assembly. I'm not sure if the
> information is available. I'll have to look at it more, but I couldn't
> even test the changes since it only works on MacOSX/Darwin and GNU gdb
> doesn't compile on Darwin.

Yeah, if I remember from my days at NeXT, the purpose of this was
in debugging something that was not really debuggable.

So some sort of compromise would seem to be in order.

If this function does not need to be general (it doesn't seem to
be used anywhere else), perhaps the apple folk can agree to some
sort of a specified API for obtaining the arguments they need.
Or perhaps they no longer need such radical optimization, and
the functions can be written in C.