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

Joe Abbey jabbey at arxan.com
Sat Mar 24 14:38:42 PDT 2012


Wow, I stand corrected... Thanks Sandeep!

Joe

On Mar 23, 2012, at 5:07 PM, Sandeep Patel 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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