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

[Joe Abbey]

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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20120323/5a1c5c30/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4350 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20120323/5a1c5c30/attachment.bin>