debugger

[John Birch]

On Mon, 04 Sep 2000, you wrote:
> Hi,
>
> has anybody (John? :-) ever considered directly linking in
> the debugger instead of interfacing with gdb's command
> line interface? In some occasions the performance of the
> debugger frontend is quite desastrous.

I'm assuming this is the "runs like treacle" effect that sometimes happens. 
This is due to the clipboard and kprocess, believe it or not :-).  I 
clobbered one of the clipboard calls which helped quite a bit, but I think 
this problem is still running around in there. Perhaps in qt2/kde2 this won't 
happen...

> This _may_ be
> in part because of the whole business of variable to string
> conversions and then parsing them again in the frontend.

Typical we're dealing with less that a k of text data, so the parsing 
performance shouldn't be a problem.

> However, I have never seen or made any benchmarks that
> confirm this.
>
> Of course, if the time spent in the conversions is negligible and the
> problem is elsewhere, is does not make sense to link with the debugger
> as it only complicates maintainance. But AFAIK Insight does this,
> so in principle gdb should have a more or less documented interface for
> a frontend. And with Qt's new licensing option, there is no reason
> to be concerned about gdb's copyright :-)

I have considered this - but one thing that I want to do is make the debugger 
framework a bit more generic, so that other debuggers can be added. (Not that 
I plan to actually add another debugger, but others have asked for this). 
This doesn't rule out using gdb as a lib, but I'd have to sit down and think 
hard how to do it.

OTOH using the lib would give more control over the data for gdb - sigh.

jbb