[cfe-dev] Debug Info Generation in Clang.

[Chris Lattner]

On Apr 23, 2008, at 2:41 AM, Sanjiv.Gupta at microchip.com wrote:
>
> I would like to use Clang front-end for our toolchain.
> One feature that we would like to see in Clang is the source level  
> debugging information generation.

Great!

>
> What is the latest state of clang debug info generation? Is anything  
> being done about it?

Right now, noone has started working on it.  This should be a  
relatively easy project to hook up though.

>
> If not, I would like to take that up. What would be a good starting  
> point?

As Shakti pointed out, this is the canonical documentation on the  
debug info:
http://llvm.org/docs/SourceLevelDebugging.html

In practice though, it would be useful to write some simple testcases  
and send them through llvm-gcc to see what code is generated.  You can  
also see similar code in llvm-gcc for turning GCC AST's into LLVM  
Debug info (e.g. for types) whose logic should translate over pretty  
directly.

To get started, I'd suggest beginning with simple line number  
information.  When you can emit the llvm.dbg.stoppoint intrinsics (and  
the metadata that describes translation units etc) you should be able  
to step through a program with GDB.  After that, I'd tackle variable/ 
function descriptors, type descriptors, etc.

Please let me know if you run into any tricky parts, this would be a  
great contribution to clang!

-Chris
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