CDT-EDC Variables

It's over 100F/37C in Austin today and we've settled in for the lengthy sweltering drought they call "summer" here. It seems pretty quiet, partly because our Finnish colleagues are all on holiday and because our team has been decimated by some sort of stomach bug that has kept people home sick for several days at a time. Now that I've recovered a bit it's time for an EDC update.

Variables, at least the simple ones, are showing up now in the EDC debugger:

It all starts when one of the stack frames is asked for a list of its local variables. The EDC Symbol service supplies the list and the name of each variable is turned into an expression for the DSF Expression service to evaluate. When EDC evaluates the expression (which is really just the variable name) it needs to get the value of the variable.

For most simple types this is done by getting the location of the variable and reading memory from that address. Yet getting a variable's location out of the symbol information (DWARF 2 in this case) can be a complex multi-step process. For example, the symbol info might say integer X is stored 14 bytes off the stack pointer which is based on a register value with maybe an offset thrown in depending on where you are in the function. But eventually you get to read an value of the correct size (based on the variable's type) and you have something to use for the value of the expression, which is then dropped into the Variables View.

Of course we have a lot more to do with variables: complex types, formatting, location info etc. but the basic framework is in place to build on.