Re: How to skip function prologues with stabs debug infomation?

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>]

> It's well-known that people can take advantage of SAL info when to
> skip prologue with dwarf info. I wonder whether we can do the same
> thing with stabs.

I think you can achieve pretty much the same results with stabs as
with DWARF. The SAL info in DWARF is more detailed, but if you only
care about line numbers, it should be mostly OK.

You do have to realize, however, that "skipping the prologue" is
very vague in the case of optimized code, since you might have your
prologue split in multiple blocks. Perhaps you meant skip all
instructions that are associated to the prologue, even if it means
skipping some instructions that are not part of the prologue.
But, myself, I'd much rather stop at the first instruction associated
to user code, which means that sometimes, part of the prologue might
still not have been run yet. Debugging optimized code often means
losing a lot of the convenient things we have when debugging non-
optimized one.

(and, really, if you are going to debug optimized code, you're going
to have a lot of problems if you must use stabs - most of them probably
worse than simple prologue skipping)

-- 
Joel