[Bug gdb/21225] Which version of gdb should I use for best reliability

["palves at redhat dot com" <sourceware-bugzilla at sourceware dot org>]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21225

Pedro Alves <palves at redhat dot com> changed:

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                 CC|                            |palves at redhat dot com

--- Comment #1 from Pedro Alves <palves at redhat dot com> ---
The first question is so open ended that it's impossible to answer in any
detail.  For one, I have no idea what exactly you mean by "reliable".  But
obviously the general answer should be "the latest version".  GDB is constantly
improving.

For the rest of the questions, "yes to all".

> do the developers of gdb ever use gdb to debug gdb?

Of course.

> do the developers of gdb ever debug code that use C++ 

Yes.  GDB is a C++11 program now [1], so we're dogfooding C++ nowadays.  A few
problems became more evident, but none that we didn't know about already.
We have two major projects going on to improve C++ debugging.  One is using G++
for C++ expression evaluation, via the "compile" command.  The G++ side is
going to be in GCC 7, and the GDB side is being prepared for submission.  The
other is improving the linespec parser and symbol search so that it becomes
possible to set breakpoints on functions with gdb ignoring namespaces.  I can
point you at testing branches for all of this if you're interested in helping
out.  The wiki has pointers to these and other ongoing projects.

> or DSOs?  

Yes, of course.  Specific suggestions on what should be improved are welcome.

> Do the developers ever look at examples that are larger than 10K?

Yes.  We know of houses that have many users that load huge programs into GDB. 
Some even employ GDB maintainers.  We have tests in our testsuite to exercise
some use cases with representative "huge" programs.  There's a lot of scope for
improvement, of course.

> (To answer a potential response question, yes I am getting a bit fed up.  And 
> if I am getting fed up, there are many more that have given up on gdb being a 
> useful tool.)

I'm sorry to hear that.

[1] https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/cxx-conversion

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