From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 8906 invoked by alias); 19 Sep 2002 20:48:26 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 8899 invoked from network); 19 Sep 2002 20:48:23 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.redhat.com) (216.138.202.10) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 19 Sep 2002 20:48:23 -0000 Received: from ges.redhat.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost.redhat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF5463DBB; Thu, 19 Sep 2002 16:48:17 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3D8A3811.5040502@ges.redhat.com> Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 13:48:00 -0000 From: Andrew Cagney User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD macppc; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020824 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Daniel Jacobowitz , Scott Moser , Biswapesh Chattopadhyay Cc: GDB List , leiming , Anjuta devel Subject: Re: how to use libgdb ? References: <20020919133221.GA17132@nevyn.them.org> <20020919190703.GA1494@nevyn.them.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-09/txt/msg00289.txt.bz2 For a background see: http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/papers/libgdb2/ http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/papers/libgdb (I've also added, slightly edited, one of the more legendary Cygnus Internal white papers which is where MI came from.) > The point is that there will never be a stable ABI. Speaking just for > myself, I don't want a hack like this that we can never support. We > have a machine interface - MI - and it should give you everything you > need; if you think communication with GDB has any performance > implications, you need to think about it a little more. If you think > there are functionality gains from bypassing MI then MI should be > extended. Yes. Given that Apple has proven that MI can be made to work, I don't see benefit in adding (and hence implicitly supporting) yet another interface. Remember, MI is documented and *tested*, you'll not get that with some sort of internal ABI. It is also very important keep in mind that directly linking GDB to an application is not some sort of performance silver bullet. It isn't. Too many other factors influence GDB/GUI performance - screen refresh overhead, target step performance, cost of a stack unwind, even system load, ... Having said this, there is a very long term goal of implementing all MI and CLI commands using functions of the form gdb_(). That, however, is very very long term (finished around '10?). At present there are to many internal architectural problems to address. Andrew