Contributing debug symbol lookup
Right now, a lot of my code is focussed on converting numeric memory addresses into textual function names – with a location in the source code. (For the non-techies… computer programmes get converted from an English-like form to a coded form which can be used by the computer. I need to convert one aspect of that coded form back to what the programmer can understand).
I tried several ways of achieving this, spending several weeks hitting brick walls. I eventually found a solution but it’s rather complex. So I’d rather switch to a more sensible solution, and get rid of all that unnecessary complexity. Nokia’s existing debug technology already has routines to perform this conversion, but those routines aren’t currently accessible to me; so I’d really like Nokia to add an interface to allow me to access it.
This part of Eclipse is structured such that it includes generic debugging software and interfaces. Below that, each vendor implements their own debugger, so that it performs according to those interfaces.
So, if Nokia were going to add this facility, ideally somebody would add the interface to the generic layers, and then Nokia would implement this interface in their layer. This also makes sense because I know other people from other companies want the same facility that I do. So I volunteered to write the generic layer, and asked around at the pluginfest to find out who would know about how to approach that. The answer, invariably, was Nokia themselves… the implication being that I’d have to hassle Nokia to find out how to add this stuff to the generic layer, whilst they were also kindly implementing the facility in their own implementation layer.
That doesn’t sound like a good plan to me. And the alternative is that I try to hack this API into place without any wisdom or guidance from others, which doesn’t sound any better. So I think I’ll just wait and see what Nokia come up with. If they are able to produce such an API, I’ll then look at whether it can retrospectively be made generic, and try to contribute at that point.
April 1st, 2007 at 12:59 pm
[...] One of my most troublesome bits of code has been to resolve numeric memory locations into useful descriptions of the code that lived there. Many of my tools squirt thousands of these memory locations from the device to the debugger, and I later present them to the programmer. They’re useless if I can’t convert from the memory location to something the programmer can understand: the function name and source code location. [...]