From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 26398 invoked by alias); 1 Aug 2008 13:55:14 -0000 Received: (qmail 26385 invoked by uid 22791); 1 Aug 2008 13:55:12 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from sibelius.xs4all.nl (HELO sibelius.xs4all.nl) (82.92.89.47) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:54:46 +0000 Received: from brahms.sibelius.xs4all.nl (kettenis@localhost.sibelius.xs4all.nl [127.0.0.1]) by brahms.sibelius.xs4all.nl (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id m71Dq16Q028674; Fri, 1 Aug 2008 15:52:01 +0200 (CEST) Received: (from kettenis@localhost) by brahms.sibelius.xs4all.nl (8.14.3/8.14.3/Submit) id m71Dq1iY027637; Fri, 1 Aug 2008 15:52:01 +0200 (CEST) Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:55:00 -0000 Message-Id: <200808011352.m71Dq1iY027637@brahms.sibelius.xs4all.nl> From: Mark Kettenis To: drow@false.org CC: eliz@gnu.org, vladimir@codesourcery.com, gdb@sources.redhat.com In-reply-to: <20080801131312.GA14712@caradoc.them.org> (message from Daniel Jacobowitz on Fri, 1 Aug 2008 09:13:12 -0400) Subject: Re: Move GDB to C++ ? References: <487658F7.1090508@earthlink.net> <20080801131312.GA14712@caradoc.them.org> Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2008-08/txt/msg00007.txt.bz2 > X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org > Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 09:13:12 -0400 > From: Daniel Jacobowitz > > On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 09:42:28PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > From: Vladimir Prus > > > Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:10:37 +0400 > > > > > > I think this discussion went a bit wrong way -- trying to convince folks that > > > *investing effort* in converting to C++ is justified. However, I don't think > > > the proposal is about making folks not interested in C++ doing any work -- the > > > proposal is about allowing folks who do some specific work, and want to make > > > use of additional features C++ provides, to use those features, while not imposing > > > significant problems on the rest of contributors. > > > > Your being busy refactoring does impose a significant problem on me. > > We are members of the same team, so how you use your time while on the > > team is important to me. > > Could you please expand on this idea? > > Certainly the event of refactoring will have a big impact on all > contributors. That's at the moment of commit, and not before. So if > you think it's actively harmful, that's a different issue from the > one Vladimir is talking about here. > > GDB is a GNU project, driven by volunteers and sponsored contributors. > And the sponsored contributors are volunteers from the perspective of > anyone outside the sponsoring organization. I don't understand the > objection to other people choosing to invest effort on something, even > if you think it's unimportant. Volunteer projects go where their > volunteers want to take them! > > And I think one of the bit structural issues in GDB is that it's hard > for even active volunteers to take it to new places. I want to make > that easier. [ This is not directed at Daniel in particular, his message was just happened to be a convenient one to reply to. ] Guys, can we please stop this! These discussions are now taking up almost all the time I have to hack on GDB. I feel obliged to take part in them because I see them as a threat for the platforms I care about, and the way GDB is shipped on those platform. But I really hate it. More concretely. On OpenBSD we build GDB as a native debugger on all our platforms. Some of these platforms still use GCC 2.95.3, because later versions are slower, have a bigger memory footprint and have more bugs, at least as far as the C compiler is concerned. Others use GCC 3.3.5 for much the same reason. This is unlikely to change soon, especially if GCC is going to be rewritten in C++. Rewriting GDB in C++ is bad news for those platforms because GCC 2.95.3 is not a very good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library. I don't think exception handling works reliably on all these platforms. Things will get even slower and will probably require more memory than some of my machines have. I don't think it is acceptable to effectively drop support for a platform for which there is a fairly active developer. I'm not going to waste more of my time on this discussion. But please don't interpret my silence as an agreement. Mark