Re: Bootstrap failure of gcc-ss-20010409 in ia64

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Wilson <wilson@cygnus.com> writes:

    Jim> Not emitting the abstract origin attribute would be easy.
    Jim> This will give a die with no type or size info, which is
    Jim> pretty useless.  I suspect gdb will give a reasonable error
    Jim> message instead of failing, but haven't tried it yet.

    Jim> For a slightly more complicated change, we could check to see
    Jim> if the abstract origin attribute was emitted, and if not,
    Jim> then treat it like a non-inlined local variable.  This would
    Jim> allow the user to still be able to look at the variable, but
    Jim> the output would be a little confusing since the debugger
    Jim> would claim that we have a variable that doesn't exist in the
    Jim> source code.

I think either of these two alternatives would be fine.

In my experience, using GDB to debug optimized, heavily inlined code
really has never worked.  You tend not to be able to see variables,
you tend to find that step/next work oddly, and often you end up
jumping entirely out of the function spontaneously.

So, I guess I don't think this will be a major inconvenience to
anyone, relative to the current state.

In the long run, we should do better, but it sounds like these changes
would do the trick for GCC 3.0.  At this point, we have to be looking
for minimalist solutions.

Thanks,

--
Mark Mitchell                   mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC               http://www.codesourcery.com