Re: Defending GCC considered futile

[Daniel Colascione]

On 02/09/2015 07:37 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2015 17:24:45 -0500
>> From: "Perry E. Metzger" <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>,
>>      address@hidden
>>
>> On Mon, 09 Feb 2015 17:06:52 -0500 Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>>> They must have worked for a long long time
>>> to replace the capabilities GDB already had.
>>
>> No, actually. Because the rest of the compiler wasn't intentionally
>> made non-modular, it was possible for the LLDB team to re-use the
>> code from the rest of the toolchain. LLDB doesn't need things like its
>> own expression parsing and interpretation code because it can call
>> into Clang/LLVM at will.
> 
> Parsing source-code expression is a very small part of what GDB does.
> So this is a red herring.

It's also one of the most frustrating parts of GDB. Subtle problems in
parsing C++ (who can blame GDB for that?) often make it difficult to
produce certain expressions in that language, especially in programs
with complicated templates. If GDB were able to reuse a common parsing
system, AST library, and completion engine, it would be both smaller and
more robust.

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