Re: GDB plugin

André Pönitz
2012-05-08T22:06:34Z

On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 11:16:11AM +0530, Abhijit Halder wrote:
> [...] I am not completely aware of the limitation of this approach,
> but it makes me happy thinking that the GDB users who want to extend
> GDB functionality but are not well accustomed with GDB source code,
> can still write their own pluggins and use an enhanced GDB without the
> pain of recompilation of entire GDB source code.

I guess I fit the bill of a "user[s] who want to extend GDB
functionality but are not well accustomed with GDB source code"
rather well. It's something I've been doing for quite a while now.
However, the idea of writing plugins for GDB is not exactly
appealing to me.

For one. the "pain of recompilation of entire GDB source code" you
mention does not exist. It's a straight-forward ./configure &&
make, not even with enough waiting time for a successful trip to
the coffee maker (Unless you are on Windows and need to build all
dependencies, but that would not be different for plugins)

Secondly, GDB is pretty extensible using Python scripting already,
giving "zero compile time" and platform independent access to a lot
of functionality. It's hard to see how compiled plugins would
improve that situation. I'd rather expect the effort for creating
and maintaining a plugin interface to eat into the already scarce
resources of the developers, for really not much benefit.

So, please, pretty please, can we drop the idea? ;-)

Andre'