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Re: Deprecate DBX/stabs?


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


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