Re: [cdt-dev] Pretty printing in gdb7

[Tom Tromey <tromey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "Terry" == Terry Parker <tparker@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Terry> I haven't found definitive documentation yet

Everything is in gdb/doc/gdb.texinfo.  There's a section under the
Python scripting documentation about writing pretty-printers, and a
section about how to set them up to be auto-loaded.  The MI section of
the manual explains the new MI additions.

If the docs are confusing, or incomplete, or unclear, please report
that too, and I will fix it.

Terry> If the MI commands are smart about using the iterator returned by
Terry> children(), this should scale to large collections and allow the
Terry> DSF-GDB framework to remain very responsive.

The initial patch series included some Mi commands so that the MI
consumer could select a subset of the children for display.  In this
case I think the MI implementation still iterated over all the
children, but it would only report a subset over the channel to the MI
consumer.  So, while not as efficient as possible, it was still better
than today.

However, we removed these commands in response to maintainer comments.
The issue was that they were not used in the wild.  I think we could
resurrect these if some MI consumer implemented experimental support
for them and proved them to be a useful approach.

Tom