Re: [PATCH:MI] Return a subset of a variable object's children

[Nick Roberts <nickrob at snap dot net dot nz>]

 > > Again in scientific computing, arrays often have many more than 10000
 > > elements.  In image processing arrays are two dimensional 512x512 with
 > > over 250,0000 elements.  The user would have to identify the region of
 > > interest for the display widget, e.g. [110:120][220:230] for a 10x10
 > > square centred at (115,225).
 > 
 > It seems to me that specialized widgets are more suitable for this purpose,
 > like image viewer, or a charting component. Especially with image data,
 > using varobjs is probably not going to work. Creating varobjs per each item
 > will be just too slow -- we need some high-bandwidth interaction way, like
 > the memory-reading commands.  (And maybe those should have stride options).

Other debuggers, e.g., Totalview have this capability and it's not slow.  In
England, I used it on a professional basis and found it useful.

 >...
 > >  > Please feel free to implement generic list datastructure in C, or
 > >  > rewrite gdb in C++.  So far, using vector proved to be big convenience.
 > > 
 > > Clearly I'm not going to do either but we could simply go back to using
 > > the linked list structures that were already in varobj.c.  It's a question
 > > of whether the convenience outweighs the handicap of having to work with
 > > vectors all the time or not.  IMHO it doesn't.
 > 
 > I disagree, and I haven't yet seen a practical "handicap". We're not going
 > back to hand-written data structures for MI implementation.

Well it's a shame that convenience should dictate the type of structures that
are used because I can get this patch to work with an old Gdb using linked
lists.

-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob