Re: stabs and macro information

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 01:27  PM, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 11:58:19AM -0400, David Taylor wrote:
> > Currently, when invoked with -gdwarf-2 -g3, gcc will record macro
> > information in a .debug_macinfo elf section.  And when presented with
> > an executable containing macro information in a .debug_macinfo
> > section, gdb will make use of it.
> >
> > Many companies, including EMC, still use stabs.  So...  it would be
> > nice if the same was true of stabs.
>
> A more interesting question, to me, is why EMC still needs to use
> stabs.
I didn't want to get into this argument, as there are companies that 
have valid reasons not to use DWARF2 given the current implementations, 
particularly those compaonies that end up with 1 gigabyte with stabs 
info, and 5 gigabytes with dwarf2 info, or something like that.

However, I was going to ask whether the cost of *adding* more features 
to the STABS implementations in gdb and gcc is worth the future 
maintenance cost at this point in the life of STABS.
> They are an inferior debug format, extremely hard to parse or
> extend.  GCC's and GDB's current implementations of DWARF-2 (and 3) are
> somewhat lacking, but it's all fixable.

And, more importantly, in the process of being fixed.
:)

> --
> Daniel Jacobowitz
> MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer