| Joerg Sonnenberger | 340a175 | 2013-09-25 10:37:32 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> |
| 2 | <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> |
| 3 | <head> |
| 4 | <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> |
| 5 | <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> |
| 6 | <title>LLDB Goals</title> |
| 7 | </head> |
| 8 | |
| 9 | <body> |
| 10 | <div class="www_title"> |
| 11 | The <strong>LLDB</strong> Debugger |
| 12 | </div> |
| 13 | |
| 14 | <div id="container"> |
| 15 | <div id="content"> |
| 16 | <!--#include virtual="sidebar.incl"--> |
| 17 | <div id="middle"> |
| 18 | <div class="post"> |
| 19 | <h1 class ="postheader">Goals</h1> |
| 20 | <div class="postcontent"> |
| 21 | |
| 22 | <p>The current state of the art in open source debuggers are that |
| 23 | they work in the common cases for C applications, but don't |
| 24 | handle many "hard cases" properly. For example, C++ expression |
| 25 | parsing, handling overloading, templates, multi-threading, and |
| 26 | other non-trivial scenarios all work in some base cases, but |
| 27 | don't work reliably.</p> |
| 28 | |
| 29 | <p>The goal of LLDB is to provide an amazing debugging experience that "just |
| 30 | works". We aim to solve these long-standing problems where debuggers get |
| 31 | confused, so that you can think about debugging your problem, not |
| 32 | about deficiencies in the debugger.</p> |
| 33 | |
| 34 | <p>With a long view, there is no good reason for a debugger to |
| 35 | reinvent its own C/C++ parser, type system, know all the |
| 36 | target calling convention details, implement its own disassembler, |
| 37 | etc. By using the existing libraries vended by the LLVM |
| 38 | project, we believe that many of these problems will be defined |
| 39 | away, and the debugger can focus on important issues like |
| 40 | process control, efficient symbol reading and indexing, thread |
| 41 | management, and other debugger-specific problems.</p> |
| 42 | |
| 43 | <p>Some more specific goals include:</p> |
| 44 | |
| 45 | <ul> |
| 46 | <li>Build libraries for inclusion in IDEs, command line tools, and |
| 47 | other analysis tools</li> |
| 48 | <li>High performance and efficient memory use</li> |
| 49 | <li>Extensible: Python scriptable and use a plug-in architecture</li> |
| 50 | <li>Reuse existing compiler technology where it makes sense</li> |
| 51 | <li>Excellent multi-threaded debugging support</li> |
| 52 | <li>Great support for C, Objective-C and C++</li> |
| 53 | <li>Retargetable to support multiple platforms</li> |
| 54 | <li>Provide a base for debugger research and other innovation</li> |
| 55 | </ul> |
| 56 | </div> |
| 57 | <div class="postfooter"></div> |
| 58 | </div> |
| 59 | </div> |
| 60 | </div> |
| 61 | </div> |
| 62 | </body> |
| 63 | </html> |
