Xcode and cross-platform debugging

["Dr. Rolf Jansen" <rolf dot anroni at gmail dot com>]

I had the need of cross-platform debugging using GDB + Xcode/Mac OS X  
at the host platform, targeting a Cocotron application on Windows XP.  
I worked on it and succeeded.

Since Xcode cross-platform debugging is a very specific need, I did  
not and still do not want to bother this mailing list too much with  
it. At least, I wanted to give you a chance to think about whether  
some of my work might be interesting for the main line or not. Anyway,  
here comes a short description what has been done so far.


I found out, that the MI dialects of Xcode and GNU GDB diverged in the  
past few years very much, and that there was no easy way to make Xcode  
and cross-platform debugging with GNU GDB work without major code  
changes. So, I started to work on it, by forking GNU gdb  
6.8.50.20080428-cvs.

After some initial trials and failures, I figured out that the best  
approach for achieving my goal would be to add another machine  
interpreter to the present GNU GDB. Therefore, based on GNU mi, I  
added the new machine interpreter for Xcode that I called  "miX". I  
then deliberately mixed in the missing code and/or essential changes  
from Apple GDB-956/960/961. Besides this, I needed to make only some  
minor changes on the other parts of GNU GDB.

To make a long story short, I succeeded. Xcode cross-platform  
debugging works very well now, and I am going to make the cross  
debugger available to the Cocotron community - http://www.cocotron.com.

In order not to violate the terms of the GPLv3, I set up everything  
(including the complete history of changes since the initial fork) as  
a project at Google Code - http://code.google.com/p/xcxdb/.

Best regards

Rolf Jansen