This is the mail archive of the
gdb@sourceware.org
mailing list for the GDB project.
Re: Move GDB to C++ ?
Mark Kettenis wrote:
>> X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org
>> Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 09:13:12 -0400
>> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 09:42:28PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > > From: Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com>
>> > > Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:10:37 +0400
>> > >
>> > > I think this discussion went a bit wrong way -- trying to convince folks that
>> > > *investing effort* in converting to C++ is justified. However, I don't think
>> > > the proposal is about making folks not interested in C++ doing any work -- the
>> > > proposal is about allowing folks who do some specific work, and want to make
>> > > use of additional features C++ provides, to use those features, while not imposing
>> > > significant problems on the rest of contributors.
>> >
>> > Your being busy refactoring does impose a significant problem on me.
>> > We are members of the same team, so how you use your time while on the
>> > team is important to me.
>>
>> Could you please expand on this idea?
>>
>> Certainly the event of refactoring will have a big impact on all
>> contributors. That's at the moment of commit, and not before. So if
>> you think it's actively harmful, that's a different issue from the
>> one Vladimir is talking about here.
>>
>> GDB is a GNU project, driven by volunteers and sponsored contributors.
>> And the sponsored contributors are volunteers from the perspective of
>> anyone outside the sponsoring organization. I don't understand the
>> objection to other people choosing to invest effort on something, even
>> if you think it's unimportant. Volunteer projects go where their
>> volunteers want to take them!
>>
>> And I think one of the bit structural issues in GDB is that it's hard
>> for even active volunteers to take it to new places. I want to make
>> that easier.
>
> [ This is not directed at Daniel in particular, his message was just
> happened to be a convenient one to reply to. ]
>
> Guys, can we please stop this! These discussions are now taking up
> almost all the time I have to hack on GDB. I feel obliged to take
> part in them because I see them as a threat for the platforms I care
> about, and the way GDB is shipped on those platform. But I really
> hate it.
>
> More concretely. On OpenBSD we build GDB as a native debugger on all
> our platforms. Some of these platforms still use GCC 2.95.3, because
> later versions are slower, have a bigger memory footprint and have
> more bugs, at least as far as the C compiler is concerned. Others use
> GCC 3.3.5 for much the same reason. This is unlikely to change soon,
> especially if GCC is going to be rewritten in C++. Rewriting GDB in
> C++ is bad news for those platforms because GCC 2.95.3 is not a very
> good C++ compiler and ships with an outdated STL library. I don't
> think exception handling works reliably on all these platforms.
I believe that for GDB purposes, 2.95.3 is just fine. In fact, 2.95 is
exactly the release where gcc's C++ support became OK.
> Things will get even slower and will probably require more memory than
> some of my machines have.
Do you have exact value, or estimate, or how much the performance and memory
consumption will suffer?
- Volodya