Re: Using XML in GDB?

Daniel Jacobowitz
2006-01-27T19:06:36Z

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 01:39:49PM -0500, Paul Koning wrote:
> Eli> Is XML the only widely used standard that supports what we want?
>
> No, it isn't.
>
> You're essentially asking for an easily extensible, flexible
> protocol. XML is one of those; it is the extremely verbose end of the
> "make it all ASCII" approach used in the Internet for decades. Then
> again, the same is true for the existing remote stub protocol.
>
> Another extensible protocol that comes with definition tools and
> checkers, but is much more compact, is SNMP. Or, more precisely,
> ASN.1 (the definition language) and BER/DER (the encoding rules).
>
> If one of the goals is bit efficiency of the encoding, rather than
> maximum verbosity, then ASN.1/DER is far better than XML. Chances are
> the implementation would be smaller, too.

I'm curious; are there "authoring" tools for ASN.1? I need something
that will work as both a file format and a wire protocol.

Ah, it looks like there are. Debian has an emacs mode, a specification
compiler, an object dumper, perl bindings, and two C libraries. A bit
sparse compared to the XML tools available, but should be adequate if
there's a compelling advantage for it. Beyond that, I'm not at all
familiar with it.

Of course, there's also some rumors of "an ASN.1 variant of XML"...
and "gzip layered over XML", which is a pretty good one too.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery