RE: Built-in type handling in gdb

[vijay nag <vijunag@gmail.com>]

Hello GDB,

I have a simple GDB script to walk through the heap given a core file.
The data types used in the scripts are all primitive C data types and
any non primitive user defined data types have been avoided to speed
up the execution. In the older version of GDB(say gdb-7.0) this script
finished execution in a jiffy, the new gdb is way too slow in
execution. I built gdb-7.0/7.6 from source and observed the difference
in execution.

As part of this commit "NEWS: Mention OpenCL C language support
2010-11-05  Ken Werner
<ken.werner@de.ibm.com>(https://github.com/dov/gdb/commit/100d4cd4f6f42014c07e6acd0d9b6187d1259b2e)
* c-exp.y: Lookup the primitive types instead of referring to the
builtins.", parse_type macro(get from builtin) has been changed to a
function call lookup_signed_typename(). This function seems to be
doing an exhaustive global/static symbols search even for a C
primitive data type(say int) there by consuming plenty of CPU cycles.
Should we be doing this exhaustive search of data types from the
binary file even for basic C primitive data types ?