Re: PATCH to buildsym.c

[Todd Whitesel <toddpw at windriver dot com>]

> hard for me to imagine compiler people intentionally emitting a line
> note correponding to the next instruction, then emitting another line
> note *not* corresponding to that instruction, and then emitting the
> instruction itself.  That's a little odd.

Compiler people vary widely in their committment to good debug info output.

I'll spare you the details, but over the years I've learned to be very
cynical about this. Attribute preservation in the face of optimization is
actually a quite tough problem, whether it's for debug info or volatile
qualifiers or something else. Many compiler folks I have dealt with just
seem to stick their heads in the sand and wish the whole issue would simply
evaporate, but of course it can't.

Having worked on compilers a bit myself, I've seen how the preservation
code can explode the complexity of many algorithms. It may be hard, but
it's still necessary. I consider this to be more of a "grand challenge"
problem worthy of study than the futile ILP stuff dictated by Merced.

-- 
Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ windriver.com