GCC C Compiler producing Microsoft debug format?

[Daniel Berlin]

On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 06:16  PM, Jim Wilson wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 14:01, Venkatesh Ramamurthy wrote:
>> My other option was to write some extensions to gcc
>> code which could produce PDB file format naturally. If
>> you could give me some pointers on that, i would
>> appreciate it.
>
> Since I don't have any info on the PDB format, I can't really say
> anything useful about this.
>
> I can say that getting useful debug info is a significant amount of
> work.  If the MS PDB format is very close to an existing supported
> format, then it shouldn't be much work to write a converter, or to add
> PDB support to the existing gcc debug info generator.  However, if it
> really is a different format, then this will be a lot of work.

It's really different.
>
> There is also the potential problem of supporting a MS format which
> probably changes with each compiler release.  If MS provides public
> documentation for the format, then it may be feasible.  If MS does not
> provide documentation, and views this as a proprietary interface, then
> it may not be feasible to support it.

It's not feasible.

About a billion years ago (when i was young. I'm old now, 24 and all), 
i added support for codeview/pdb (pdb = a slightly modified codeview 
debug format, though it's getting more divergent over time, obviously) 
to gcc and gdb.
The documentation is simply not there. It looks like it's kinda there, 
but it's really not.  At least, it was nowhere near sufficient back 
then. I could do basics, but not much more.
It was around the same time i first reverse engineered the MS name 
mangling (which has been done many times by different people since 
then).

MS now has a library that can read the PDB files that they suggest 
using (as of vs.net).
No source, last i looked (a few months ago).

>
> Jim
>
>