[lldb-dev] A bit of extra-polish for my lldb plugin

[Pavel Labath via lldb-dev]

On 31 May 2017 at 19:40, Jim Ingham <jingham at apple.com> wrote:
> Pavel, can you say more about your idea?
>
> In both ObjC and C++ methods, you can refer to an ivar either as "this->ivar" or just "ivar".  But the DWARF for C++ doesn't tell lldb that a particular language supports referring to ivars transparently this way.  It will say that the "this" parameter is artificial, and that it is the "object pointer".  But it doesn't so far as I can tell record the fact that elements of that parameter can be transparently accessed.
>
> I think it would be confusing for the debug information to record the transparently accessed ivars as pseudo-locals, the duplication would confuse folks, and that isn't how they are understood by the person writing the code.  It might be good to propose a "DW_AT_transparent" attribute, and mark the ivars or maybe the parameter that way.  I guessing that wasn't done because it was assumed that the debugger would know this sort of rule from the language in question.
>
> As I understand it, problem here is that Nat's runtime has extra rules for transparent access that lldb doesn't know about.
>

I understood the problem differently, although I can't really say
whether it was correct or not. My impression was that the members of
the "_param" struct were **parameters** to the method, which have
become (due to some source code transformations, or ABI
considerations) members of a single struct parameter. So a programmer
would write (i'm not going to try to write this in objc)

int foo(int x, int y) { return x+y; }

and the some frontend would transform this into:

struct foo_params {int x,y;};
int foo(foo_params *_param) { return _param->x + _param->y; }

before passing it into the real compiler.

If this is the case then I think it makes sense to have the dwarf
describe the original source code, and not the intermediate form.
However, if it's something else, then that's likely not a good idea,
and I should probably shut up, as I obviously don't know enough about
objc to be of help here.

cheers,
pl