[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

Fri Oct 30 17:12:20 PDT 2015

From: Saleem Abdulrasool [mailto:compnerd at compnerd.org]
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2015 10:02 PM
To: Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com>
Cc: Dave Bartolomeo <Dave.Bartolomeo at microsoft.com>; llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org; cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] RFC: CodeView debug info emission in Clang/LLVM

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:08 PM, Adrian Prantl via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:

> On Oct 29, 2015, at 10:11 AM, Dave Bartolomeo via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
>
> Proposed Design
> How Debug Info is Generated
> The CodeView type records for a compilation unit will be generated by the front-end for the source language (Clang, in the case of C and C++). The front-end has access to the full type system and AST of the language, which is necessary to generate accurate debug type info. The type records will be represented as metadata in the LLVM IR, similar to how DWARF debug info is represented. I’ll cover the actual representation in a bit more detail below.
> The LLVM back-end will be responsible for emitting the CodeView type records from the IR into the output .obj file. Since the type records will already be in the correct format, this is essentially just a copy. No inspection of the type records is necessary within LLVM. The back-end will also be responsible for generating CodeView symbol records, line numbers, and source file info for any functions and data defined in the compilation unit. The back-end is the logical place to do this because only the back-end knows the code addresses, data addresses, and stack frame layouts.

Thanks for proposing this.

How different are the type records from the type information we currently have in LLVM's DIType hierarchy? Would it be feasible to move the logic for generating type records from LLVM metadata into the backend? This way a frontend could be agnostic about the debug information format.

I think that this really is the path we want to follow.  If the current metadata we emit is insufficient, we should augment it with additional information sufficient to generate the necessary data in the backend.  The same annotations would then be able able to generate one OR both debug info formats.

[dB] I considered that approach, but I see a few reasons why I don’t think making the debug metadata format agnostic would work out very well. To ensure that the backed can generate both debug formats by itself, we need to make the metadata contain enough information from the original AST for the format-specific code in the backend to generate the debug info. I believe that in practice, we’d wind up having to encode a significant portion of the AST (for decls of types and members, at least) into metadata, because debug type info, at least in CodeView, strives for pretty close fidelity with the declarations and types in the original source language. The CodeView debug type info is used by the VS debugger to parse and evaluate C++ expressions while debugging. We currently have a bunch of limitations in our debugger’s expression evaluation due to information missing from the debug type info, and we’ll probably attempt to preserve even more of that information going forward. There’s not much information from the AST that we can ignore if we want to reach that goal. Of course, we could just accept that we need the majority of the AST for type and function declarations in the debug metadata, and do that work in order to avoid having the frontend know about debug info formats, but that just means that now the backend code that generates the debug info has to know about all of the source language-specific constructs that it’s reading when creating the debug info. I think I’d rather have Clang have to understand the language-specific parts of multiple debug info formats than have LLVM understand language-specific metadata.

As an example, the CodeView definition of a user-defined type requires both the mangled name of the type and the non-mangled “display name” of the type. Both of these require a fair bit of information from the AST to generate. For the mangled name in particular, there’s already code in Clang that generates this. If we want the backend to do this instead, we have to stuff a bunch of AST info into metadata, and then figure out how to share the name mangling code between Clang (where it operates on actual ASTs) and LLVM (where it would operate on metadata). If, instead, we have Clang compute the mangled name and display name and pass those names in the metadata, we’re not being particularly format-agnostic in Clang, and if the current compilation is only generating DWARF, we didn’t really need to compute or store those potentially large strings for every type anyway.

Whether Clang is format-agnostic or not, there will have to be some component that converts from something format-agnostic (either ASTs or metadata) to DWARF, and some component that converts from ASTs or metadata to CodeView. You can put those two components in Clang and accept that Clang won’t be format-agnostic. Or, you can put those two components in LLVM, which leaves Clang as format-agnostic but requires that LLVM be more source language-aware. It also requires a third component to translate ASTs into metadata to pass to LLVM. Letting Clang worry about two different debug type info formats seems preferable to writing additional code and making an LLVM component understand more about the source language.

Is there another approach I haven’t thought of that would let us wind up with a cleaner solution? I’ve only been working with the Clang and LLVM debug info code for a few months, so my knowledge of the existing design is far from complete.

Note that for the rest of debug info (line numbers, source files, stack layouts, etc.), I don’t think the frontend should have to worry about the debug info format, and the current design for those pieces is just fine. It’s only the type info that I think is source language-specific enough to justify computing it in the frontend.

-- adrian
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--
Saleem Abdulrasool
compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
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