Re: Windows support in GDB

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 09:43:35AM -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
>
> > Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >
> > > However, now that the patches are finally here, I have to say that I
> > > sort of share Mark K's concerns.  I'm wondering if we are on a slippery
> > > slope and (to mix a metaphor) will be subjecting gdb to a
> > > death-by-inches as we slowly add ifdefs throughout the configury and
> > > code.
> >
> > I think it's a funny time to get concerned -- we're done.
>
>
> For now.  Didn't you just theorize more involvement from the MinGW
> community now that your patch is in?

Possibly -- but I'd expect that to be more in the area of adding 
features for debugging Windows applications, if that were to be needed.

> I guess the failure mode will be roughly similar to DJGPP.  Every time
> someone decides that it would be nice to use signal(), select(), fifos,
> inodes, unix-domain sockets, or some other non-msdos construct there
> will have to be a discussion about how to make things work.  But, I
> guess we'd already be having this discussion to with DJGPP so maybe it
> won't be a big deal.

I agree with both your assessment of the potential problem and the 
impact.  (Even Cygwin doesn't provide complete emulation for absolutely 
everything, so I'd imagine that some of that discussion would need to be 
had anyhow.)

> > I certainly don't think the entire codebase will be littered with 
> > HANDLEs and ReadFileEx, or transformed into a multi-threaded application 
> > with a Windows event loop in the middle of it, or anything like that.
>
> No, but maybe we should rewrite gdb in c++.  That sounds like it would
> solve everything.  :-)

Then Windows support would just be a specialization of some class 
template. :-)

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304