Re: Move GDB to C++ ?

[Stan Shebs <stan@codesourcery.com>]

Mark Kettenis wrote:
> Guys, can we please stop this!  These discussions are now taking up
> almost all the time I have to hack on GDB.  I feel obliged to take
> part in them because I see them as a threat for the platforms I care
> about, and the way GDB is shipped on those platform.  But I really
> hate it.
>   
I agree, seems pretty much beat to death at this point. I originally 
brought it up because I wanted to get a sense of where everybody was at 
these days. People's attitudes toward programming languages do change, 
but not because of mailing list discussion.
> 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 good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library.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.
> Things will get even slower and will probably require more memory than
> some of my machines have.
>   
This sounds like a good litmus test actually. Either ensure that GDB 
continues to run, and reasonably well, on OpenBSD, or drop OpenBSD as a 
supported native.
> I don't think it is acceptable to effectively drop support for a
> platform for which there is a fairly active developer.
>   
Perhaps you'll get some company, if C++ fans set up OpenBSD systems so 
as to see what language features they can expect to work. :-)

Stan