Re: MSVC and DIA

[Stan Shebs <stan@codesourcery.com>]

Gabe Black wrote:
> GDB seems like a viable alternative, and all that seems to be missing
> is symbol interpretation.  Microsoft provides the Debug Interface
> Access SDK (DIA) which I did not find referenced in any of the mailing
> lists.  It is an SDK that allows you to get at any of the debug/symbol
> information in a PDB even if the format of the PDB changes.  I would
> like to add PDB symbol support to GDB.  I am fairly new to GDB but I
> have been able to implement the remote stub running on the target
> without much trouble.  However the challenge lies in adding the symbol
> support.  From what I understand, BFD is where I would need to add the
> PDB symbol support.  I didn't find much about it in the gdb online
> documentation, both in the user manual and internal documentation.
>   
Using somebody else's library can be a pain, because you have to adapt 
every mismatched call on the fly, both at the BFD level (which is really 
about symbols and blocks of data), and at the GDB level (which then 
interprets the blocks of data as debug info). You might find it easier 
to simply write a tool that translates a PDB file into an ELF+DWARF 
file, then have GDB read that. Since you control every detail of output, 
you needn't necessarily use BFD to write the file even; just dump out 
canned sequences of bytes for the file as a whole, and similarly for the 
DWARF equivalents of PDB constructs. Running GCC on Linux and doing -S 
-dA (?) will give you annotated assembly code showing what GDB is going 
to expect for different kinds of data, often easier than trying to grok 
the whole DWARF spec.

Stan