From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jim Blandy To: Gianni Mariani Cc: gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com Subject: Re: Why does C++ support in GDB suck so badly ? Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 12:04:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <3B92D5C0.5050302@mariani.ws> X-SW-Source: 2001-09/msg00047.html Gianni Mariani writes: > It is really bad that you can't examine a simple data structure - because > of "virtual baseclass botch" or "Value can't be converted to integer " > messages. Yep. One problem that I know happens is this: - GDB doesn't understand namespaces, so the name of a class like `a::foo' gets recorded as simply `foo'. - When you print a value of a dynamic type (i.e., one with a virtual table), GDB tries to check the RTTI to find its true type. From the RTTI it gets the type name `a::foo'. Unfortunately, it can't find this type name in its symbol table, since it appears only under `foo'. This is kind of silly. > I'm willing to help - but my reseach tells me that's going to be useless: > > http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-03/msg00475.htm > > Is gdb so bad now that it needs to be thrown out and started again - in > C++ ? No, I don't think so at all. > Lack of response to my query on August 21st also shows a real lack > of interest from the current gdb team so I'm worried. No, we're very interested. What we need is a volunteer who can do a solid job of fixing things up. The patches that have been posted so far have a lot of problems --- they don't show much concern for corner cases at all. They eagerly trade correctness for speed, which I feel is the wrong choice. If someone with more patience for details could tackle the problem and put together some better patches, that would be wonderful. The right volunteer would be someone who can read the code and figure out how things work for themselves --- there is no thorough internals documentation, and we have to learn the structures afresh ourselves each time we work on them. > Will someone on the gdb team please let us know what your plans are > to address the lack of C++ support - even if you have none . Like all free software projects, we depend on contributions from capable volunteers. Please help us make this work better.