[LLVMdev] DWARF 2/3 backwards compatibility?

[Eric Christopher]

> With time, you might get to a point where Dwarf is a first-class
> citizen and there will be basic compatibility checks in "make check"
> and a build bot for GDB test suite on some platforms, but to get
> there, you'll go through a lot of pain.
>

Hopefully not too much. Paul has been helping and I add tests whenever
I fix something, but a quality suite is something else. Unfortunately
as the biggest consumer debugger testsuites have a tendency to be the
primary quality test for debug info.

> Dwarf implementation in LLVM, as far as I know, is ad-hoc, so you'll
> have to do some refactoring (for good) on the debug emission code.
>

I've tried to formally implement a few things, but in general it was
ad-hoc for so long this is true.

> Eric,
>
> What about the LLDB, does it support Dwarf? Is it good enough for C *and* C++?
>

As a quality suite? Probably not. There are so many more tests in the
gdb suite that it's hard to top as a first cut for quality. lldb is
another good testsuite when we try to push the boundaries though so
using both test suites is good. Unfortunately I'm not quite sure what
the state of the lldb testsuite is on elf targets these days and
haven't had time to play with figuring out how to build it.

-eric