Re: gnustep on FreeBSD and how to use the debugger

[David Chisnall]

On 1 Sep 2017, at 02:22, Gregory Casamento <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure that lldb works all that well with ObjC on non-darwin operating 
> systems at this point.

I’ve had a look at the code, and it doesn’t look like it would be too 
complicated to add.  There are three parts:

- Objective-C introspection
- Objective-C code execution
- GNUstep support

The core Objective-C part is quite abstracted (Apple uses lldb with two very 
different Objective-C runtime implementations, so that’s not entirely 
surprising).  I’m not sure I’ll have time to work on it soon, but providing a 
new ObjCLanguageRuntime subclass that pokes the GNUstep runtime for status 
should be relatively easy.

The next part requires constructing Clang Objective-C AST nodes based on 
information in the runtime.  This is not difficult, but it’s quite a bit bigger.

The final bit is a bit harder.  LLDB includes a load of stuff for 
pretty-printing various Cocoa types.  This isn’t currently abstracted into 
platform-specific versions, because Apple only has one implementation of this.  
We’d need to add some abstraction there.  It’s probably not too difficult, 
because the code is all in a plugin, so we could just load a GNUstep plugin 
instead of the Apple one.

David