Eclipse Debugger for C/C++ (EDC)

In my last post I talked about how the Eclipse C++ debugger landscape had changed and led us to want a new debugger that’s perfectly tuned to work with CDT/DSF and Eclipse. The existing work in the debug platform and CDT/DSF provides a nice set of services that include user interface elements, commands, and APIs for debug data access. What’s missing is the part of the debugger that knows how to interact with the thing you are debugging to actually get the memory and register values, do run control, provide variable values etc. Traditionally this has been provided by a debugger back-end of some sort: CDT includes an integration of DSF and gdb while other tools vendors have a similar debugger engine, often extracted from their legacy product.

When taking a fresh look at this it didn’t make much sense to create a monolithic debugger back-end and try to integrate it with CDT/DSF. DSF already provides a well designed service model, what’s missing is a complete set of services to flesh out a debugger. Extending the reach of the DSF services into things traditionally done by a debugger back-end would also let us design and develop most of it using the same language, tools, and environment as all of our other Eclipse work.

Yet some services still need to reach out to native code either to interact with a native debug API or to do something performance intensive like parsing symbol files. So we would need a way for our DSF services to talk to the native code that is likely running in a different process or on another device. Fortunately the DSDP/TM/TCF project solves exactly this problem. TCF is a protocol that lets an agent (usually in native code) provide a discoverable set of services to clients (in this case our DSF services). This lets our new DSF services do as much of the work as they can and then use the TCF protocol to talk to remote devices or native code as required.

This collection of DSF services and TCF agents will form the foundation for a complete C/C++ debugger in Eclipse. So we're calling this project the Eclipse Debugger for C/C++ (EDC).

Building a new solution that will let us provide powerful, stable, maintainable, and consistent debugging for the platforms we support (Symbian, Windows, Maemo) means developing DSF services and TCF agents that target them. We’ll end up with a core set of common EDC plug-ins and agents and others that add specific support for a device or operating system. Anything of general interest will be developed within the CDT community and we'll put the Symbian specific work in the Symbian Foundation.

I'll post more details as we develop stuff.