Re: Windows support in GDB

[Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> However, now that the patches are finally here, I have to say that I
> sort of share Mark K's concerns.  I'm wondering if we are on a slippery
> slope and (to mix a metaphor) will be subjecting gdb to a
> death-by-inches as we slowly add ifdefs throughout the configury and
> code.

I think it's a funny time to get concerned -- we're done. :-)  There are 
no more cuts coming, so as long as we're not bleeding to death yet, 
we're not going to die.  Plenty of GNU software has similar patches to 
support running on MinGW.  GDB itself already has 2500 lines of code in 
win32-nat.c, some of which I would imagine is rather more opaque to 
POSIX programmers than anything we've added.

We made these changes with no algorithmic modifications to GDB, no 
perversions of its core design, etc.

What's the failure mode going to be?  If a POSIX person adds a use of 
non-Windows function, without appropriate #ifdef, then the Windows side 
of things will break.  At that point, assuming that people are noticing 
(which we will!), we'll fix that.

I certainly don't think the entire codebase will be littered with 
HANDLEs and ReadFileEx, or transformed into a multi-threaded application 
with a Windows event loop in the middle of it, or anything like that.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304