Re: GDB plugin

[Abhijit Halder <abhijit.k.halder@gmail.com>]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:36 AM, André Pönitz
<andre.poenitz@mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote:
> 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'

Well, I am not fully aware of Python interface. If this proposed idea
does not make much any in current GDB, I will not push this.

Thanks,
Abhijit Halder