Re: How to Read debug information

[Paul Pluzhnikov]

"Siegfried" <siegfried@heintze.com> writes:

> Is there compiler switch to make the compiler emit XML for each class,
> union or struct it injests?

No. However, there is this project:
http://www.gccxml.org/HTML/Index.html

> Is there an example program that will read an executable image or .o
> file and extract the type information stored there for the debugger?

There are multiple debugging formats: STABS, DWARF, DWARFv2 and v3.
The DWARF formats are current default for gcc on ELF platforms.

The format specification is here:
http://www.eagercon.com/dwarf/dwarf3std.htm

It is quite complicated, but you can get an idea of how things are
structured by compiling several simple examples, and studying output
from "readelf -w a.out"

It is quite doubtful that you'll be able to read executable image
and extract type info without significant effort. 

However, libdwarf could help you quite a bit:
http://reality.sgi.com/davea/dwarf.html

Cheers,
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