Slow handling of C++ symbol names

[Andrew Cagney]

> 
> Have you tried a more recent version of GDB?  This may have been
> improved.  Definitely some startup time issues were fixed.

Nothing in the ChangeLogs jumped out.

> Also, the demangler actually comes from GCC, not GDB.

I don't see GCC being motivated to fix it though :-(

 >  All we can do is
 > try to call it less often.

Which leads to the question.  Why does GDB demangle symbols?  My 
simplistic understanding of the code is that GDB only needs the "iw" 
(a.k.a., demangled string up to  but excluding the lparen and ignoring 
white space) part of the symbol in the search table (the rest isn't so 
critical and can be constructed on-demand).

Andrew