RE: Contribution to egcs

[Bruce Q Hammond <bruceq at pacifier dot com>]

On Sun, 1 Aug 1999, Daniel Berlin wrote:

> I'm not sure if the changes were merged with egcs yet, the Be changes seem
> to have made it into the binutils (and other pieces, as soon as i get some
> free time, i'll clean up my gdb changes and submit them), so the best place
> may just be to grab the latest sources from geekgadgets.
> It should also be on the R4.5 CD.
> 
> Someone around here might know what version/date the latest GNUPro
> distribution (99r2 i believe) is close to in the EGCS source tree (minus the
> cygnus made changes, of course)

I will check it out. Thanks.

> 
> You are barking up the wrong tree, however.
> IMHO.
> I've barked up this one before.
> What you really need to do is implement compression/removal of redundant
> DWARF2 info into ld.
> It's not an easy task.

I know already that you are right about this.  The redundant info is
horid.


> The easiest way to see if it's redundant info that's killing you is to make
> one file that includes all the source files in your project, and
> compile/link that.
> If it's about 95% smaller, your problem is redundant DWARF2 info.
> HTH,

One thing that might help me to get started is finding docs on the DWARF2
spec / implemetation notes. 

I would like to find a way the the redundant info was not written to the
.o files in the first place... perhaps an option for all the DWARF2 info
to be written to a projectname.dwf file, limit the redundncy in some
effecient way and modify the debugger to look for the dwarf info in that
project.dwf file rather than in the executable.  It might wind up being
DWARF3 or some such thing. It sounds like a lot of work.

Another thing that is of interest to me is implementation of precompiled
headers for C/C++.  Has anyone done a feasibility probe on this for egcs?
I am certain that for some projects this would speed compiliation quite a
bit.


I may be getting ahead of myself before I have seen the source and
implementation notes for the c++ compiler / DWARF2 etc.

Pointers are appreciated.


cheers,
--BQ
--------------------
Bruce Q. Hammond
Gobe Software, Inc.