Re: [cdt-debug-dev] CDT Win32 Debugger

[Matthew Ballance <matt.ballance@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mikhail,
    Thanks for the feedback on dbghelp. Can you provide any specifics on differences you saw between versions? 
    There are two reasons that I'm reluctant to use
dbgeng: It's not redistributable and I think it would be more difficult
to support debugging both Visual Studio and GCC-compiled applications
(as I understand it, dbgeng contains both symbol-table and debugger
functionality. It would, for example, be difficult to insert debug info
from GCC-compiled objects). 

    Since dbghelp is redistributable, would specifying a
supported version of dbghelp and shipping that version with binary
releases of the debugger solve any problems? Can you see problems with
this approach (practical or legal)?

    I appreciate your input!

Regards,
Matthew

On 10/3/05, Mikhail Khodjaiants <mikhailk@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Matthew,

I played with the Win32 API and DbgHelp library a couple of years ago and I
had problems with different versions of DbgHelp. As Doug pointed out in one
of his postings to this list it is worth to look at DbgEng.dll instead of
DbgHelp.

Regards,
Mikhail Khodjaiants

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Ballance" <matt.ballance@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "cdt-debug-dev" <cdt-debug-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 7:39 PM
Subject: [cdt-debug-dev] CDT Win32 Debugger


> Hi all,
>
>    I've started work on a CDT win32 debugger using the 'dbghelp'
> library supplied by Microsoft. This work builds on the
> org.eclipse.cdt.debug.win32.core and org.eclipse.cdt.debug.win32.ui
> plugins started by Doug Schaefer (and others?).
>
>    The primary goal of the project is to support debugging of
> applications compiled with the Microsoft compiler. The debug format used
> by the Microsoft compiler is proprietary and undocumented. Microsoft
> supplies the dbghelp library to provide access to the debug information
> emitted by its compiler. The library is freely-distributable, which is
> important (at least to me): An important requirement of this debugger is
> that all components can be distributed with the debugger. The user
> should not need to install extra components if at all possible.
>
>    A secondary goal of the project is to create a debugger that can
> debug applications compiled with GCC as well as with the Microsoft
> compiler. This goal will be tackled in phase2 of the project (once all
> features are supported for Microsoft-compiled apps).
>
>    Thus far, I've mainly been doing research to find good sources of
> information about the Sym API (the API supplied by dbghelp.dll). The API
> is documented in the Microsoft SDK  documentation, but I've found that
> some more involved examples to be very helpful. I've also started
> prototyping the debugging using what I've learned about walking the
> stack, accessing local symbols, settings breakpoints, etc.
>
>    Since I'm very early in the design and implementation of this
> project, I would appreciate any feedback that others have. I'm
> particularly interested to know whether others would be interested in a
> debugger that can debug applications with M.S.-compiled and/or
> GCC-compiled components.
>    If others are interested in working on implementation, I would also
> be interested.
>
>
>
> Thanks and Regards,
> Matthew
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