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Re: Deprecate DBX/stabs?
- From: Jim Wilson <jim dot wilson at linaro dot org>
- To: David Edelsohn <dje dot gcc at gmail dot com>
- Cc: Nathan Sidwell <nathan at acm dot org>, Richard Biener <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>, GCC Patches <gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org>, Jason Merrill <jason at redhat dot com>, Jim Wilson <wilson at tuliptree dot org>, Jan Hubicka <hubicka at ucw dot cz>, Mike Stump <mikestump at comcast dot net>, Iain Sandoe <iain at codesourcery dot com>, Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>, 10walls at gmail dot com
- Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2017 09:03:00 -0700
- Subject: Re: Deprecate DBX/stabs?
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <CAGWvnynDPj3vbYxR+Fv5cduCQd5JQNLsL2zu2frL+Ch67BwFuQ@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 7:15 AM, David Edelsohn <dje.gcc@gmail.com> wrote:
> AIX still uses DBX as the primary debugging format. AIX supports
> DWARF but the AIX toolchain does not fully interoperate with DWARF
> generated by GCC.
We could still deprecate DBX_DEBUG while leaving XCOFF_DEBUG alone for
now. This would encourage people to migrate to DWARF2. We won't be
able to drop dbxout.c until both DBX_DEBUG and XCOFF_DEBUG are dropped
which could be a while, but we can perhaps avoid any new users of
stabs.
I see that avr-*, *-lynx, pre-darwin9 32-bit i686-darwin, *-openbsd,
pdp11-*, vax-*, and cygwin/mingw32 with obsolete assemblers still
default to DBX_DEBUG. Some of those can be dropped, and the others
can migrate to dwarf.
There is also the matter of SDB_DEBUG which is still supported, and is
no longer used by anyone, as we have already deprecated all of the
COFF targets that were using it. SDB support for C++ is even worse
than the DBX support. This should be no problem to deprecate and
remove. We could perhaps even just drop it without bothering to
deprecate it first.
Jim