Re: can't find class named `foo', as given by C++ RTTI

[Jim Blandy <jimb@zwingli.cygnus.com>]

Benjamin Kosnik <bkoz@redhat.com> writes:
> This is a new class of errors that I've started seeing recently. I'm
> getting this from debugging efforts on x86/linux with current CVS
> 'src' and 'gcc' modules. For what it's worth, both --with-dwarf2 and
> default toolchains have the same error.
> 
> 
> (gdb) p *__fp
> can't find class named `std::numpunct<char>', as given by C++ RTTI

This means is that GDB wanted to find the run-time type of some object
(probably *__fp), and failed.  Here's how GDB tries to find an
object's run-time type:
- GDB extracts the object's vtable.
- it looks up the linker symbol naming the vtable (which was
  _ZTVSt8numpunct, or something like that).
- it demangles that name (and got "vtable for std::numpunct")
- it pulls off the "vtable for " part
- it tries to look up the type name (in this case, "std::numpunct") in
  its full symbol table
  
In this case, GDB wasn't able to find the name std::numpunct.

Probably GDB should have been able to find std::numpunct.  But does
the rest of the process look reasonable?  That is, was the run-time
type of *__fp indeed `std::numpunct'?  The output from `ptype'
suggests that its compile-time type is `class facet'.  Perhaps
something went wrong well before we ever tried to look up the type
name.