blob: 3bbb75904ecfc81e50b8c1fab5a94840f0e5fdf7 [file] [log] [blame]
Greg Clayton854bb532010-06-10 02:48:57 +00001<!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">
Chris Lattner3cc7b7f2010-06-11 23:07:14 +000016 <!--#include virtual="sidebar.incl"-->
Greg Clayton854bb532010-06-10 02:48:57 +000017 <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>
Benjamin Kramer46a8cf32010-06-10 08:12:17 +000058 </div>
Greg Clayton854bb532010-06-10 02:48:57 +000059 </div>
60 </div>
61</div>
62</body>
Benjamin Kramer46a8cf32010-06-10 08:12:17 +000063</html>