[LLVMdev] PDB debug info

[Manu]

On 12 September 2012 20:49, Nathan Jeffords <blunted2night at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> /Z7, that's the one. Maybe this approach can be used by LLVM? I presume
>> LLVM is capable of producing CV info already? Maybe this configuration is
>> already possible?
>>  It'd be interesting to try it out, CV in the COFF objects, and see if
>> the linker makes sense of it at link time...
>>
>>
> I was able to get clang to produce COFF files with embedded DWARF
> debug relatively easily, which produces executables debuggable via the
> MinGW tool-chain.
>

This sounds effectively identical to what I have now using MinGW GCC to
produce COFF binaries with DWARF debug info, and then running cv2pdb after
linking to extract a PDB from the binary. It works, but it means I can't
link against MSVC libs/objects because of the conflicting debug info
formats. :/


To support another debug format would be difficult I think, though I'm no
> expert on the subject. Currently LLVM internally represents everything more
> or less directly in DWARF. All of the debug meta-data attached to the IR is
> a slightly higher representation of DWARF data-structures. While there is a
> debug info builder class the insulates front ends from the details of DWARF
> to some extent, it is not complete isolation. I think the
> only feasible approach is to translate the DWARF info into CV info at a
> lower level, perhaps after the initial COFF object file containing DWARF
> has been emitted.
>

Okay, so CV isn't supported, not sure where I got that idea >_<
Hmmm, okay, well I think I'm back where I started using the MinGW toolchain
in that case...

Oh, it's all so problematic ;)

I'd also argue that the VS debugger is possibly the single biggest
>> productivity enhancement offered by the IDE ;)
>> And yeah, I'm in the situation where I need to link against MSVC built
>> code, so I need PDB at the end of the day.
>>
>> Your approach would be really handy in other cases though, DWARF plugin
>> for VisualStudio would be a generally useful tool.
>>
>
> From what I was able to gather while looking into a debugger plugin, the
> existing user interface would drive all debuggers, thus the user should
> have more or less the same debugging experience with any fully
> implemented plugin.
>

This sounds like what WinGDB does. As I understood it, there is a problem
with WinGDB, where they said they weren't able to actually implement their
debugger plugin without implementing a custom project type, which mutually
excludes the Visual Studio build architecture.
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