_MSC_VER == windbg?

[Stan Shebs]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> Can anyone confirm or deny the fact that all of the _MSC_VER conditionals
> in gdb are for windbg?  I suspect that they are and I'm pretty certain
> that gdb won't build using Microsoft Visual C these days.

[I would have responded yesterday, but after seeing all those old bits
of code that Eli exposed, I felt ill and had to go home early. :-)]

Yes, once upon a time that hacker's hacker, Steve Chamberlain, for
whom no hack was too gross to try, thought he'd have some fun making
a GUI GDB that ran as a normal Windows program (this was before cygwin),
built using MFC and VC++.  Until gdbtk+cygwin was fully functional a
couple years later, WinGDB was the only version of GDB that ran on
Windows and had a graphical interface, and was thus very popular with
Cygnus customers.  On the other hand, it was hard to find engineers
who weren't going to quit instead of working on it :-), so it was never
really reliable, and inevitably we ran into VC++ version problems as
well, thus the _MSC_VER tests.

The GUI code all sat in an mswin/ subdirectory, and the main code
had to be tweaked to be C++-friendly, which you see described in a
Jan 1995 ChangeLog entry by Steve.  The splash screen for the
interface included a picture of him with various utensils sticking
out of various orifices, and eventually engendered an official bug
report from an unamused customer, who thought that the image was
"unprofessional".  I suppose it was... :-)

Stan