[cfe-dev] GSoC 2012 project idea: PDB format support.

[Svyatoslav Kuzmich]

Thank you for suggestions. I also found book: Undocumented windows 2000
secrets <http://undocumented.rawol.com/>. Its outdated but contains some
information about PDB structure. It also has an open-source PDB explorer
(probably outdated too).  Unfortunately I have no official documentation.

I agree project is too big for one student. That's why I'd like to propose
only a part. Maybe there is a student who want to cooperate? It would be
nice to divide the project into parts and do it together.


On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:22 AM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhgari at gmail.com>wrote:

> AFAIK Wine's implementation of dbghelp.dll includes code for reading PDB
> files.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Ehsan
> <http://ehsanakhgari.org/>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Sandeep Patel <deeppatel1987 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> It looks like the format is pretty well described at
>> http://ccimetadata.codeplex.com
>>
>> deep
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Joe Abbey <jabbey at arxan.com> wrote:
>> > The PDB file format is historically undocumented.  We've been trying to
>> get
>> > a copy of the spec for years, and have even held several calls with MSFT
>> > compiler teams and they've been unwilling to provide documentation.  I'm
>> > thinking this alone is a blocker to complete any forward progress on
>> this
>> > effort.
>> >
>> > The DIA SDK does provide PDB reading capabilities, but no emission.
>>  While I
>> > agree that it would be extraordinarily cool to have, unless you want to
>> > reverse engineer the proprietary format, I'm afraid it's a dead-end.
>> >
>> > Joe
>> >
>> > Joe Abbey
>> > Director of S/W Development
>> > Arxan Technologies, Inc.
>> > 1305 Cumberland Ave, Ste 215
>> > West Lafayette, IN 47906
>> > jabbey at arxan.com
>> > www.arxan.com
>> >
>> > On Mar 23, 2012, at 2:43 PM, David Chisnall wrote:
>> >
>> > On 23 Mar 2012, at 17:42, Svyatoslav Kuzmich wrote:
>> >
>> > I would like to implement support of VIsual Studio debug info format
>> (*.pdb)
>> > as part of Google SoC 2012.
>> >
>> > Is it suitable for Clang? Is there someone who want to mentor for this
>> > project?
>> >
>> >
>> > It certainly sounds interesting and worthwhile, but it would be a pretty
>> > huge project - I don't think you could expect to complete it in the 10
>> weeks
>> > of the GSoC.  Have you looked at the complexity of the existing debug
>> info
>> > stuff in LLVM (this is more of an LLVM project than a clang one, since
>> clang
>> > would emit the same debug info to the IR, it would just be translated
>> > differently into the final output) and do you have documentation for
>> the pdb
>> > format?  For it to be a good project for the GSoC, you'd need to split
>> it
>> > into a series of smaller steps and indicate how long you thought each
>> one
>> > would take.
>> >
>> > Please don't take this as discouragement - better Windows support is
>> > definitely something that we'd like to see, and being able to use Clang
>> and
>> > the Visual Studio debugger would make a lot of people I know happy...
>> >
>> > David
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> >
>> >
>> >
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-- 
Svyatoslav Kuzmich
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