Re: GNAT Codesize

[john@assen.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:

>John McCabe said (speaking of symbol information in executables)

<..snip..>

>  ">(c) it would violate system standards, which are to keep debugging
>   >       information in the objects and executables. The GNAT approach
>   >       is deliberately system standard compatible to allow use of
>   >       standard debuggers.
>   Yes, that appears reasonable. Obviously this tends not to be so
>   important in the cross-compilation systems I mentioned as they must
>   provide their own proprietary debuggers and processor simulators.

>Actually in my experience this is exactly wrong. It is for cross-development
>that it is most critical to generate debugging information in standard
>system format. For example, many of the hardware emulators provide builtin
>debugging capability based on generation of symbol information in object
>files and executables in the standard format. Such systems will typically
>have utilities to strip/remove/process this information in a form that is
>suitable for the emulator use, but it is critical that it be generated in
>standard format. In fact thinking about cross-systems is one of the strong
>arguments in favor of the GNAT approach of using standard debugging info.

Not in my experience. My current compiler uses a proprietary format
and even when using an Tek emulator with a Tek 8086 Pascal
cross-compiler on a VAX we had to use a separate utility to format the
output for use in the emuulator.


Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>