Re: Will therefore GDB utilize C++ or not?

Jan Kratochvil
2012-04-18T15:54:14Z

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:27:55 +0200, Pedro Alves wrote:
> I don't like the prospect of a fragmented GDB with important parts in C and
> others in C++,

OK, we can therefore target only this problem. I do not think we should
seriously code anything in C.

Primarily one can argue there will be already some problem GDB itself will
require C++ environment so that one can no longer run GDB in the early system
bootstrap phases. I think this disadvantage everyone has already agreed with
for the C++ benefits for GDB.

So there remain only the very niche cases of bootstrapping system without C++
yet and having connected rich system with GDB so that one wants to use
GDBSERVER. I believe some very simplistic C gdbserver can be used for such
case. I admit I never bootstrapped such new system myself. I believe only
few people in the world do so, AFAIK new architectures are no longer being
created so commonly as before even for those few toolchain developers.

Making GDB crashing for every GNU/Linux end-user developer just to make easier
bootstrapping system for the few toolchain developers is IMNSHO not worth it.

I do not repeat all the Bugs here leading to GDB crashes I get continuously
from ABRT (bugreporting system) in Bugzilla due to missing automatic code
sanity checking possible with C++.

We can talk about the C gdbserver, I believe it can be forked from the current
codebase and removed almost everything there, including threading support.
But I do not have experience with new architectures bootstrapping myself.

Thanks,
Jan