From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stan Shebs To: Christopher Faylor Cc: gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: _MSC_VER == windbg? Date: Wed, 09 May 2001 12:15:00 -0000 Message-id: <3AF996F2.48F68B5A@apple.com> References: <20010508153704.A26443@redhat.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-05/msg00192.html Christopher Faylor wrote: > > Can anyone confirm or deny the fact that all of the _MSC_VER conditionals > in gdb are for windbg? I suspect that they are and I'm pretty certain > that gdb won't build using Microsoft Visual C these days. [I would have responded yesterday, but after seeing all those old bits of code that Eli exposed, I felt ill and had to go home early. :-)] Yes, once upon a time that hacker's hacker, Steve Chamberlain, for whom no hack was too gross to try, thought he'd have some fun making a GUI GDB that ran as a normal Windows program (this was before cygwin), built using MFC and VC++. Until gdbtk+cygwin was fully functional a couple years later, WinGDB was the only version of GDB that ran on Windows and had a graphical interface, and was thus very popular with Cygnus customers. On the other hand, it was hard to find engineers who weren't going to quit instead of working on it :-), so it was never really reliable, and inevitably we ran into VC++ version problems as well, thus the _MSC_VER tests. The GUI code all sat in an mswin/ subdirectory, and the main code had to be tweaked to be C++-friendly, which you see described in a Jan 1995 ChangeLog entry by Steve. The splash screen for the interface included a picture of him with various utensils sticking out of various orifices, and eventually engendered an official bug report from an unamused customer, who thought that the image was "unprofessional". I suppose it was... :-) Stan