Re: GDB variants accepting plugins (to the debugger) ?

[Jan Vrany via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

On Sat, 2026-01-31 at 10:00 -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
> > > > > > "Matt" == Matt Rice <ratmice@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> Matt> Anyhow I would be/have been somewhat interesting in putting in
> Matt> time/effort into working on this sort of building out wasm inspired by
> Matt> parts of the python API, but it feels like you'd probably want to put
> Matt> a big experimental sticker on it in the sense that it could end up
> Matt> with some component-model upstream change which in theory may mean
> Matt> that the bytecode compiled pretty printer may be tied to a particular
> Matt> version gdb using whatever version of the component model. In the same
> Matt> sense that we currently rely on a python version (with the difference
> Matt> being that python is much longer history of stabilization than the
> Matt> component model which)
> 
> Matt> So in my opinion there is a little more to it than just putting in the
> Matt> work, there is a lot less prior art than python modules.
> Matt> Perhaps it would be best to start out with configure option not
> Matt> enabled by default, with the understanding that it is currently
> Matt> experimental.
> Matt> something like --enable-experimental-wasm-plugins or some such.
> Matt> Anyhow I would be excited to play around with it some if there was a
> Matt> roadmap for how we want to handle these issues...
> 
> FWIW another idea in this space is the LLDB bytecode
> 
> https://lldb.llvm.org/resources/formatterbytecode.html
> 
> That page makes it sound like the plan is to have the compiler emit this
> bytecode, but I haven't really paid attention to see if that's happened.
> 
> I wonder if it would be possible to implement any of these without
> really touching the gdb core.  That is, some Python shims that load wasm
> or whatever and do what is needed.
> 
> 

I do not see why not - a Python API to access sections and/or minsymbols
might be needed though. I've done something similar in the past, including
the section/minsymbol API (but never got to polish it an submit :-(

Jan




> Tom