[Info-vax] ada archives and debug

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-01-18 19:28:04 +0000, g	rard Calliet said:

> Le 18/01/2018 à 19:44, Simon Clubley a écrit :
>> On 2018-01-18, gérard Calliet <gerard.calliet at pia-sofer.fr> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Now customers demand debug. I'm in the beginning of evalution of this facility.
>>> 
>>> For what I know, Adacore didn't give debug (in VMS style), and they say 
>>> HP didn't "cooperate" on that. I'm wondering if there are been effort 
>>> for that anywhere.
>> 
>> What's wrong with simply using gdb or are you saying that it wasn't 
>> possible for you to build gdb for a VMS target ?
> I don't know about gdb. The need is being able to use VMS standard 
> debug in a context of multi-langage images (pascal calling Ada calling 
> C ...) where VMS calling standard and VMS debug are just fine.

Ada would need to be updated to generate the debug record formats, and 
there'd need to be some support integrated into the debugger.

I placed a copy of the then-current debugger symbol table and related 
stuff on OpenVMS Freeware V5.0.   
http://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v50/debug/    IIRC, binutils 
has some related support, too.

Itanium integration would be somewhat easier, as the more common ELF 
and DWARF formats are used on OpenVMS I64.   There'd probably be some 
need to update for any VMS-isms in that, and work in the debugger to 
add support for Ada there.

This is not a weekend project, by any stretch.  It'll very likely 
require OpenVMS source code, too.

AFAIK, there aren't any language-specific plug-ins in the OpenVMS 
debugger.  Though that'd be a nice addition, if VSI doesn't decide to 
punt on the traditional debugger in the longer-term, and migrate to and 
use lldb for future work.

As for debuggers, I've become fond of the ability of lldb to be scripted.

And the Apple macOS Xcode IDE integration with the debugger completely 
blows away anything I've seen available or have used on OpenVMS; 
integrated or third-party.

For this project, you're undoubtedly going to end up using two 
debuggers, as the only alternative is debugging the unsupported 
language(s) from machine code in the other of the two debuggers.




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