Re: [PATCH] Allow printing of Guile values

Jim Blandy
2007-07-20T17:37:06Z

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org> writes:
>
>> Unfortunately, Guile support has been removed from GDB, so this patch
>> no longer applies.
>
> Hmm, that was against GDB 6.6.
>
> It's unfortunate that support has been removed without leaving Guile
> folks an opportunity to do something about it.
>
> Is there a chance that minimal support could be reinstated?

Definitely. Part of the rationale for deleting it was, "Oh, if
someone shows up to keep it alive, we've still got it in CVS." I'll
be happy to review changes. The key is that someone make themselves
available to keep it working.

> It's true that most of the `scm-' files in 6.6 are unfinished,
> outdated, or complex (they actually re-implement parts of Guile,
> which is admittedly overkill and certainly hard to maintain). By
> "minimal support", I mean that we'd arrange to move most support
> routines in Guile, and leave (almost) maintenance-free code in GDB.

A debugger should be able to inspect the state of programs in serious
disarray, so there's an argument against relying too much on invoking
functions in Guile. Certainly, though, the best code would draw a
clear distinction between scm-lang.c and scm-lang-guile.c.