Re: ASIS?

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

parthaspanda22@gmail.com wrote:
>>I thought ASIS only has "high-level" information prior to the
>>target-dependent object-code generation and linking. I think the
>>debugger will need the link map, information about the stack frame
>>layouts, record layouts, etc, which is not in the ASIS domain. Am I
>>wrong?
>>

You list various non-ASIS sources for the target- and 
link-map-specific information (below). Your original query was:

 > If one were to need an API to fulfill all requirements by
 > a Debugger, Source Browser and a Syntax-aware editor from
 > the IDE, then would ASIS be it?

It was the point "all requirements" to which I objected, but I must 
have misunderstood or not noticed your phrase "... from the IDE", 
which I now understand means "... apart from the information that 
can be had from other sources". But there are some executable 
program formats that include most of the ASIS-like information (for 
C code, at least), so for such executable formats a debugger would 
need no additional information from the IDE.

Anyway, your question and Ludovic's answer are sensible if one 
assumes that the "other sources" are some limited executable format 
such as ELF without DWARF.

> 1) link map:
...
>     (The map file provides this feature).

Yes, or the debugging info in the executable file.

> 2) stack-frame
> 
>     A lot of the information about stack are constants(e.g. the bias,
>     the frame pointer register, the stack pointer register,
>     the ABI) and these are hard-wired into the debugger.

Depends on the target. Some ABIs are very flexible and let the 
compiler do what it likes.

> 3) record layouts
> 
>    Again, this is in the domain of the ABI

Indeed, but as above it can be very flexible / unspecified.

So in addition to ASIS the debugger needs the target-specific 
information from some other source. That was my point, sorry if I 
added noise.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .