fwd: is LLDB a threat to GDB's success? #999

[Pedro Alves]

I should perhaps add that the opinion expressed was mine alone
and does not represent the opinions of my past, present, and
future employer(s).  :-)

Pedro alves wrote:

>> - Good C++ support.
>>
>> This stems from modularity.  lldb reuses llvm/clang (the C/C++ compiler
>> frontend) for expression evaluation/parsing, thus it has excellent
>> C++ support.  GDB has its own built in C++ expression parser, which
>> is poor.  GNU of course already has excellent parsers inside GCC/G++,
>> but unfortunately, for years GCC did not really welcome modularity
>> and reuse, and that now bites back, hard.  As the C++ world shifts
>> more and more to C++11/C++14, the more GDB is bitten by this,
>> as it doesn't understand basic new features that have been added
>> to the language.  LLDB gains support for such new features for
>> free whenever clang gains support for the same.

This of course was missing lots of context, but, I'll add that
GDB's not actually sitting and waiting here.  There's a project
going on already that is exactly about reusing GCC/G++ in GDB.

The first step has landed in GDB 7.9 already, in the form of
the "compile" command, which compiles, injects, and executes
a C expression, making use of GCC through a plugin.  See:

  https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Compiling-and-Injecting-Code.html

We're discussing next steps for the project here:

 https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2015-02/msg00019.html

Everyone's more than welcome to join!

Thanks,
Pedro Alves