Pascal Viandier wrote:

I use gpc 20050331 build with gcc 3.4.3 on SUN Solaris2.6. I have gdb 5.3 installed, but it does not work very well with gpc:

• The current source line is wrong most of the time
• 'Next' do strange steps backward and forward
• Program does not stop where I put the breakpoints, but some lines

before or after

Same problems on powerpc-apple-darwin.

Regards,

Adriaan van Os

Pascal Viandier wrote:

I use gpc 20050331 build with gcc 3.4.3 on SUN Solaris2.6. I have gdb 5.3 installed, but it does not work very well with gpc:

• The current source line is wrong most of the time

This is a known problem in current GPC.

• 'Next' do strange steps backward and forward

Unfortunately, this is normal. GPC is an optimizing compiler and in particular instructions are usually executed in different order then the source. For example, given:

a := b; {line 1} c := d; {line 2}

the typical order is to first compute (fetch from memory) b and d and then to perform assignments. So you something like:

line 1 line 2 line 1 line 2

With correct line numbers and a little practice it actually makes sense. For debugging use -O0 to disable optimization, but even at -O0 some optimization still takes place.

• I cannot see strings contents (it says incomplete type)
• Arrays of characters are displayed as binary (0's and 1's)
• Some randomized gdb coredumps
• Program does not stop where I put the breakpoints, but some lines before

or after

It is probably first problem: wrong line number info.

I use DDD on top of gdb, but I have exactly the same problems when I use gdb alone. Since I am presently converting a lot of code from SUN Pascal to gpc, the debugger is somewhat essential...

So, is there a 'recommended' version of gdb to use with gpc 20050331? Also, are there some 'recommended' gdb settings for gpc?

Hard to make a recommendation. I use gdb-6.3 with a patch to fix some DWARF problems. The patch fixes most crashes (but the crashes were DWARF-specific) for me. Since Solaris-2.6 uses stabs your problems are probably quite different.