[lldb-dev] Anybody using the Go/Java debugger plugins?

[Pavel Labath via lldb-dev]

The Go support for added by Ryan as a 20% project. Now that he's no
longer working for Google, it's pretty much abandoned.
The Java support was added by us (android folks) to support java
debugging (to a certain extent). However, we never really finished the
project, so we're not using that code now. We're hoping to come back
to it one day, but I agree we should not burden everyone else while we
make up our mind on that.

So I don't think anybody would shout at us if we removed them right
now, but maybe we should make some effort to find a maintainer for
them before removal? E.g. publicly declare that they are going to be
deleted on date <X> unless a maintainer steps up to take care of them
(we can define the minimum level of support we'd expect from such a
maintainer). Then I can e.g. forward the email to the Google Go folks
and see if anyone of them wants to take that up.

As for Java, I'm going to bring up the desire to remove the Java
plugin on our team's meeting this week and get back to you with the
result.


In general I think that a clear deprecation/removal process would be
nice to have. I have a couple of things I think are broken/unused
(PlatformKalimba? non-stop mode?) but I haven't brought them up
because I was unsure how to handle it.


On 22 January 2018 at 15:28, Davide Italiano <dccitaliano at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> during my wandering I stumbled upon the `Go` and the `Java` plugins in
> the lldb source tree.
> They seem to not have been touched in a while, and I'm not necessarily
> sure they're in a working state. Keeping them in tree is a maintenance
> burden, so unless somebody is actively using them or somebody is
> willing to step up as maintainers, I'm not necessarily sure we should
> pay this price.
>
> An alternative would be that of having a pluggable mechanism to add
> language support (I haven't fleshed out the details of this yet, but
> it should be possible, somehow). Other languages which have out of
> tree support might benefit from this (e.g. Swift/Rust).
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Davide