[lldb-dev] lldb access in Emacs via realgud

[Rocky Bernstein via lldb-dev]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 3:37 PM Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com> wrote:

>
> > On Sep 11, 2019, at 1:08 AM, Rocky Bernstein via lldb-dev <
> lldb-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hi - I just wanted to mention that if there are emacs users there is an
> interface to lldb via realgud. See https://github.com/realgud/realgud-lldb
> >
> > A MELPA package and ELPA packageElpa package are available too
>
> Nice. It's always exciting to see wider adoption through better editor
> integration. Out of curiosity, how does this compare to regular gud.el? (
> https://opensource.apple.com/source/lldb/lldb-69/utils/emacs/gud.el.auto.html
> )
>

"Regular" gud? The most recent copyright on that link is 2008. I see a
gud.el in 26.2 and in the GNU savannah git sources, but neither mentions
lldb. Assuming that file is really from 2008, has lldb changed since then?
(This is a rhetorical question).  But the broader question is really who is
maintaining that file you link, clearly it is not the GNU Emacs community.
And how easy is it to do so? I see an "arch" tag on the file, so I guess
this in version control somewhere. But if there is a bug in this file, what
does one do? (This is not a rhetorical question; if you know the answer, I
am interested.)


Adapted from https://github.com/realgud/realgud/blob/master/realgud.el

Here we make use of more modern programming practices, more numerous and
> smaller files, unit tests, and better use of Emacs primitives, e.g. buffer
> marks, buffer-local variables, structures, rings, hash tables. Although
> there is still much to be desired, this code is more scalable and suitable
> as a common base for an Emacs front-end to modern debuggers.
> Oh, and because global variables are largely banned, we can support
> several simultaneous debug sessions.
>

gdb-mi has a nicer multi-frame display,  but you were linking to gud.el
which doesn't have that as far as I know. realgud-lldb at this point
probably knows more about lldb. But you guys can probably verify that, and
if realgud-lldb is lacking, I'd be interested to learn what should be
added.

gud has always been a bit too monolithic - it contains every debugger
(including some obsolete ones - does anyone really still use dbx
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbx_(debugger)>, and if so inside Emacs?).
All of this is in that one several-thousand-line file. I find this ironic
because the principal author is wrote something about "Cathedral versus
Bazaar" and this is clearly Cathedral style.

It took me quite a while to be able to break realgud into several distinct
files. In fact I had to write my own nodejs-like "require" package
<https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/load-relative.html>to be able to do internal
or relative module linking. And then after that, more work was done to
split off the debuggers from the core debugger module into separate github
projects.




> >
> > A question: what ever became of the effort to port the Emacs gdb-mi to
> lldb?
>
> We recently removed lldb-mi from the LLDB repository because nobody in the
> community was willing to maintain it. In particular the tests were so
> unreliable that most bots disabled them wholesale because they were so
> noisy. We had a GSoC student a year ago who was able to rewrite many of the
> tests in a more reliable fashion, but there were still a lot of issues
> outstanding after the project was completed. If you are interested in
> picking this up, it may be worthwhile to think about implementing lldb-mi
> 2.0 as thin python layer using the python SBAPI. Python may be a better
> choice for the kind of text-heavy glue-code that lldb-mi is. Alternatively
> it also shouldn't be hard at all to revive the existing C++ code. It's
> written in a different style than most of LLDB or LLVM (and IMO it should
> have never been accepted upstream in this form), but it shouldn't be hard
> to get building since it (thanks to the GSoC project!) is using only the
> stable public SBAPI.
>


The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!

-- adrian
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