Re: Merge of nickrob-async-20060513 to mainline?

Nick Roberts
2006-08-31T21:49:36Z

> > Also it still uses pthreads. You said previously that it should be done
> > in one process and, following a remark from Jim Ingham, that ptrace is
> > non-blocking. AFAICS the problem is that wait *is* blocking and I can't
> > see of a way to deal with that without using another thread.
>
> I've stated before that I think that making gdb multi-threaded is a
> seriously bad idea.

I don't know enough about threads to argue a case for them, but I'd like to
note that:

1) Daniel thinks that he can get the same functionality (on GNU/Linux at least)
without using them.

2) Apple's GDB is multi-threaded and this doesn't seem to cause them problems.

3) It would only be multi-threaded, at most, for the specific platforms that
asynchronous behaviour was implemented and only when invoked that way. It
could even be added as a compile option.

4) GDB appears to already to be a threaded application (at least, for me, it
uses the libthread_db library).