Re: Move GDB to C++ ?

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 07:05:14PM +0400, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> > 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 good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library.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.
> 
> I believe that for GDB purposes, 2.95.3 is just fine. In fact, 2.95 is
> exactly the release where gcc's C++ support became OK.

The part of this that concerns me is "I don't think exception handling
works reliably on all these platforms."

I'm not sure what we can say about that.  We didn't dig this hole, but
it exists none the less.  It really bothers me to be stuck writing GNU
software in 2008 that can't rely on GNU compilers released in the last
six years.

We can set up auto-testing on OpenBSD x86 without much difficulty.
But that's not where the problems are going to occur.  It'll be the
less-mainstream platforms like vax and hppa.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery