[lldb-dev] [llvm-dev] Adding DWARF5 accelerator table support to llvm

[via lldb-dev]

gc> Solution #1 would cause us to dig through all definitions of all C++
gc> classes all the time when parsing DWARF to check if definitions of
gc> the classes had template methods. And we would need to find the class
gc> that has the most template methods. This would cause us to parse much
gc> more of the debug info all of the time and cause increased memory
gc> consumption and performance regressions.

pr> It would be cheap to put a flag on the class DIE that tells you there
pr> are template methods to go look for.  Then you incur the cost only
pr> when necessary.  And the accelerator table makes it fast to find the
pr> other class descriptions.

gc> That is a fine solution. But we still run into the problem where we don't
gc> know if the DWARF knows about that flag. If we do a flag, it would be nice
gc> if it were mandatory on all classes to indicate support for the flag. But
gc> this would be a fine solution and not hard to implement.

pr> So what you really want is not a flag, but a count, so you can tell when
pr> you've found all the different templates.  If the count is zero, there's
pr> nothing to look for.  If the count is two, you look around at all the
pr> various definitions of the class until you find two different templates,
pr> then you stop.  If there's no count attribute, your producer doesn't 
pr> know you want this information and you do it the hard way.  Or, we've
pr> invented a way to describe the templates directly in the class.
pr>
pr> How's that?

gc> that would work fine.

I filed PR37816 to track this idea.

The other ideas:

 - accelerator to point to the actual instantiations
 - emitting template definitions not just instantiations

would be trickier to define and harder to implement correctly.
I won't say they can't be done, but somebody else would have to do
the heavy lifting here, unless it turns out that our debugger folks
like the idea.

--paulr