Re: libgdb

Stan Shebs
2007-11-02T20:30:20Z

Matthew Hall wrote:
> I've seen references to a libgdb project.
>
An idea left over from ancient days, never got off the ground. The
theory was that one could link it into both the traditional command-line
frontend and into various GUIs. Lots of technical difficulties, two
chief ones being that 1) it would have had to be a very "wide" API in
order to be sufficient to cover all of GDB functionality, and 2) the
library would have to be able to hand control back to the UI on demand,
difficult when inferior control uses blocking system calls. In practice,
it seems to work well enough to have the GUI be a separate program that
communicates with GDB, whether via command line or MI (machine
interface) syntax, and there is some advantage to the "firewalling"
inherent in a two-program scheme, so there's not much motivation to do a
libgdb anymore.

Stan