Re: Is bitstring support still useful?

[Jonas Maebe <jonas dot maebe at elis dot ugent dot be>]

On 17 Jul 2009, at 16:41, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

> I'd still like to know whether the existing support is used by any
> language, though.  If not, we can clean it up aggressively and remove
> the stabs reader support for bitstrings.  I suspect that it is mostly
> copied and pasted from the removed Chill support.

The Free Pascal Compiler uses it for bitpacked arrays (arrays whose  
element sizes are not multiples of 8 bits), because there does not  
appear to be any other way to represent them in stabs. I've also tried  
@P, but that seemed to be ignored by gdb (and there is no reason why  
it would mean bitpacked rather than e.g. bytepacked).

Bitpacked arrays are not used very much though, so if you can suggest  
another way to generate Stabs debug information for them, that's fine  
too (i.e., backwards compatibility is not that important in our case).


Jonas