[flang-commits] [flang] [flang] Add design document for debug info generation. (PR #86939)

[via flang-commits]

================
@@ -0,0 +1,451 @@
+# Debug Generation
+
+Application developers spend a significant time debugging the applications that
+they create. Hence it is important that a compiler provide support for a good
+debug experience. DWARF[1] is the standard debugging file format used by
+compilers and debuggers. The LLVM infrastructure supports debug info generation
+using metadata[2]. Support for generating debug metadata is present
+in MLIR by way of MLIR attributes. Flang can leverage these MLIR attributes to
+generate good debug information.
+
+We can break the work for debug generation into two separate tasks:
+1) Line Table generation
+2) Full debug generation
+The support for Fortran Debug in LLVM infrastructure[3] has made great progress
+due to many Fortran frontends adopting LLVM as the backend as well as the
+availability of the Classic Flang compiler.
+
+## Driver Flags
+By default, Flang will not generate any debug or linetable information.
+Debug information will be generated if the following flags are present.
+
+-gline-tables-only, -g1 : Emit debug line number tables only  
+-g : Emit full debug info
+
+## Line Table Generation
+
+There is existing AddDebugFoundationPass which add `FusedLoc` with a
+`SubprogramAttr` on FuncOp. This allows MLIR to generate LLVM IR metadata
+for that function. However, following values are hardcoded at the moment. These
+will instead be passed from the driver.
+
+- Details of the compiler (name and version and git hash).
+- Language Standard. We can set it to Fortran95 for now and periodically
+revise it when full support for later standards is available.
+- Optimisation Level.
+- Type of debug generated (linetable/full debug).
+- Calling Convention: `DW_CC_normal` by default and `DW_CC_program` if it is
+the main program.
+
+`DISubroutineTypeAttr` currently has a fixed type. This will be changed to
+match the signature of the actual function/subroutine.
----------------
abidh wrote:

What is meant by actual signature and how this will be different to the information that is in the FIR. My plan was to create the `DISubroutineTypeAttr` based on the information about arguments and results in `FuncOp`. A few simple cases that I tried, the results of the `ptype` command of the `GDB` were similar for executable generated with `flang-new` and `gfortran`.

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/86939