[Qt-creator] GDB Macros helper.

[Andre Poenitz]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:48:16PM +0300, Rudenko Eugene wrote:
> Hello.  Please can you provide or point about how gdb-macros
> helper interact  with GDB. Is it wrapper of GDB scripting or
> something else.  I need deep understanding of this mechanism
> to make a brain-attack  about making gdb macros helper
> suitable to help debug custom types.  Thank you, I'll wait
> for all useful information about this topic. 

It loads a library into the address space of the debugged
applications using either LD_PRELOAD or dlopen/LoadLibraryA
and uses gdb's 'call' function to execute code in that
library. Communication is done via two buffer areas in the
injected library, with gdb being used to write to and
read from these buffers.

Note that this approach is pretty fragile and I intend to
replace it rather sooner than later by using gdb's new
python based scripting, at least on Linux and Windows.
Mac and Symbian will probably stay as they are as long as
there is no python-enabled gdb available for them.

You could start coding the helpers for your custom types
in the currently existing scheme, the python code needed
for the new approach will look pretty similar, so the
porting effort will be minimal.

Andre'