Re: [RFC] Variable objects for STL containers

["Doug Evans" <dje@google.com>]

On Feb 17, 2008 12:18 PM, Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz> wrote:
>
> I think for lists, maps etc, Gdb needs to traverse the internal data structure
> each to see if there are new elements or if any have been deleted.  This need
> only be done when execution stops, of course, but I guess it could be expensive
> for stepping.
>
> The ideas here are just for discussion and I'm more than happy to look at any
> changes you might like to make.

There's something I don't understand, and maybe you can help clear
things up.  It seems like this approach is going down a path of
hardwiring a lot of knowledge into gdb.  Solving this just for STL
(and then only one version of STL) seems to be one piece of a general
problem, why pick an unscalable solution?  If the knowledge was in a
collection of dlopen'd .so (or some such), and users could provide
more, then that might be reasonable.  [Setting aside use of python for
this, I understand there is some pushback to going that route.  It'd
be cool if the python support used the same interface, then one could
have it both ways.   The python support is, of course, not just for
this and one wouldn't want python to plug into gdb in a piecemeal
fashion.  OTOH, if a clean solution could be found that let one solve
this with either C[/C++] or python then that might be very useful.]