[lldb-dev] A big thank you (and Windows support)

Carlo Kok ck at remobjects.com
Wed Jun 12 01:06:16 PDT 2013


Op 29-5-2013 20:54, Malea, Daniel schreef:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> Windows support is mostly in the 'windows' branch at the moment.. And
> as far as I know LLDB builds on Windows with VS2010, but supports
> only remote debugging of targets that support debugserver (maybe
> gdbserver as well, since the protocol is mostly compatible AFAIK).
>
> I don't believe there's been any work to support native debugging of
> Windows targets, including parsing PDB files, unfortunately..
>
> CC'ing Carlo in case he has more details.
>

Seems I completely missed this thread.

Windows works yes, but only for remote debugging. Everything also 
compiles except the different "Host" code. To debug on Windows itself 
these things would be needed:
* A windows host needs to be implemented (something that starts/attaches 
to a process, pauses/resumes it & it's threads, etc)
* Something that reads PE files. I'm not sure how debug info on Windows 
is stored, it might be more practical to start with Mingw compiled debug 
info first, and move from there.

Now PDB support/Visual C++ generated executable debugging is a whole 
other thing. As far as I know nobody has fully decyphered that file 
format, I know there are some .NET libs that can partially read the info 
they need, but I doubt that will do much good as c/c++ stores a lot more 
info.

There's another problem with that. The debugger uses clang to to 
execute/evaluate expressions, and as far as I know, clang cannot emit 
abi compatible code that matches vc yet.


That all said, the Windows branch is quite up to date and compiles with 
VC2010.



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