1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 2 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 3 <head> 4 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> 5 <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> 6 <title>LLDB Goals</title> 7 </head> 8 9 <body> 10 <div class="www_title"> 11 The <strong>LLDB</strong> Debugger 12 </div> 13 14 <div id="container"> 15 <div id="content"> 16 <!--#include virtual="sidebar.incl"--> 17 <div id="middle"> 18 <div class="post"> 19 <h1 class ="postheader">Goals</h1> 20 <div class="postcontent"> 21 22 <p>The current state of the art in open source debuggers are that 23 they work in the common cases for C applications, but don't 24 handle many "hard cases" properly. For example, C++ expression 25 parsing, handling overloading, templates, multi-threading, and 26 other non-trivial scenarios all work in some base cases, but 27 don't work reliably.</p> 28 29 <p>The goal of LLDB is to provide an amazing debugging experience that "just 30 works". We aim to solve these long-standing problems where debuggers get 31 confused, so that you can think about debugging your problem, not 32 about deficiencies in the debugger.</p> 33 34 <p>With a long view, there is no good reason for a debugger to 35 reinvent its own C/C++ parser, type system, know all the 36 target calling convention details, implement its own disassembler, 37 etc. By using the existing libraries vended by the LLVM 38 project, we believe that many of these problems will be defined 39 away, and the debugger can focus on important issues like 40 process control, efficient symbol reading and indexing, thread 41 management, and other debugger-specific problems.</p> 42 43 <p>Some more specific goals include:</p> 44 45 <ul> 46 <li>Build libraries for inclusion in IDEs, command line tools, and 47 other analysis tools</li> 48 <li>High performance and efficient memory use</li> 49 <li>Extensible: Python scriptable and use a plug-in architecture</li> 50 <li>Reuse existing compiler technology where it makes sense</li> 51 <li>Excellent multi-threaded debugging support</li> 52 <li>Great support for C, Objective-C and C++</li> 53 <li>Retargetable to support multiple platforms</li> 54 <li>Provide a base for debugger research and other innovation</li> 55 </ul> 56 </div> 57 <div class="postfooter"></div> 58 </div> 59 </div> 60 </div> 61 </div> 62 </body> 63 </html> 64
