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

[Daniel Collin]

On Jun 12, 2013, at 10:06 AM, Carlo Kok <ck at remobjects.com> wrote:

> 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.

Hi Carlo,

Thanks for the reply. Now I have a good idea of the current state for Windows. I also wonder if there is a long term plan to support Windows (natively that is and even if it was compiled with clang only)

Cheers!

Daniel