Interpreted debugging with gcj/gij

[Keith Seitz <keiths at redhat dot com>]

Hi,

Over the past few weeks, Red Hat has asked me to look into the problem
of interpreted debugging with gcj/gij. While far from the "holy grail"
of mixed interpreted+pre-compiled debugging, the debugging of
interpreted code should be a major step forward.

Although we do not have a complete implementation to offer, we do
have a bunch of patches for libjava which will add some minimal jdwp
infrastructure to gcj: jdwp configury, transport layer, object and event
management, etc. Once this is approved, I would like to invite anyone
interested in helping out to help us fill in missing functionality.

The first obvious questions are administrative: How would
maintainers and contributors like to review patches and start the
rolling of the proverbial ball?

I can certainly send a follow-on message, explaining the overall design
of the back-end which was designed with an eye on minimal impact on non-
debugging performance and VM-neutrality. My preference is to talk
implementation details when the patches are reviewed, but if you'd like
to discuss that, too, of course, that won't be a problem.

The approach I've taken (and advocate) is to lay the foundation and fill
in the blanks -- there's a *lot* of them to fill in. Right now, the
actual implementation doesn't do anything useful until a few more
missing bits are added, but we thought it most important to bring this
project out into the open as soon as feasibly possible.

Keith