Re: [PATCH 0/1] Integrate GNU poke in GDB

[Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com>]

>>>>> "Jose" == Jose E Marchesi via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org> writes:

Jose> It allows the GDB user to execute Poke code from within the
Jose> debugger with access to the target memory, types and values.

Jose> - Eventually we will probably want to ship some prewritten Poke
Jose>   code in a pickle gdb.pk.  Would $pkddatadir/poke/ be a good
Jose>   location for Poke code distributed with GDB?

Like what kind of thing are you thinking?

Jose> - How can I demangle C++ identifiers?  And how can I detect when
Jose>   a given type is a C++ one that needs demangling?

Type names normally aren't mangled.

Jose> - There are three commands:

Jose>   poke STR
Jose>   poke-add-type EXPR
Jose>   poke-add-types REGEXP
Jose>   poke-dump-types

Jose>   All three commands make sure to start the poke incremental
Jose>   compiler if it isn't running already.

It's maybe more gdb-ish to make one command and use subcommands.


I wonder if you considered implementing this by writing some Python to
glue Poke into gdb.  This would have some advantages:

* It wouldn't be a configure-time decision by whoever built gdb -- if
  you have Poke, it could "just work".  (Of course this assumes gdb is
  built with Python, but that's the norm for distros.)

* How Poke is glued in and how the commands work would be controlled by
  ordinary Poke patches, rather than having to go through GDB.  This
  would let you evolve the GDB integration along with the library.

Tom