Clean Design

In addition to getting the syntax right, there's the little question of semantics. Some things are done in certain ways in GDB because long experience has shown that the more obvious ways caused various kinds of trouble. In particular:

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You can't assume the byte order of anything that comes from a target (including values, object files, and instructions). Such things must be byte-swapped using SWAP_TARGET_AND_HOST in GDB, or one of the swap routines defined in `bfd.h', such as bfd_get_32.

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You can't assume that you know what interface is being used to talk to the target system. All references to the target must go through the current target_ops vector.

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You can't assume that the host and target machines are the same machine (except in the "native" support modules). In particular, you can't assume that the target machine's header files will be available on the host machine. Target code must bring along its own header files -- written from scratch or explicitly donated by their owner, to avoid copyright problems.

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Insertion of new #ifdef's will be frowned upon. It's much better to write the code portably than to conditionalize it for various systems.

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New #ifdef's which test for specific compilers or manufacturers or operating systems are unacceptable. All #ifdef's should test for features. The information about which configurations contain which features should be segregated into the configuration files. Experience has proven far too often that a feature unique to one particular system often creeps into other systems; and that a conditional based on some predefined macro for your current system will become worthless over time, as new versions of your system come out that behave differently with regard to this feature.

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Adding code that handles specific architectures, operating systems, target interfaces, or hosts, is not acceptable in generic code. If a hook is needed at that point, invent a generic hook and define it for your configuration, with something like:

#ifdef	WRANGLE_SIGNALS
   WRANGLE_SIGNALS (signo);
#endif

In your host, target, or native configuration file, as appropriate, define WRANGLE_SIGNALS to do the machine-dependent thing. Take a bit of care in defining the hook, so that it can be used by other ports in the future, if they need a hook in the same place. If the hook is not defined, the code should do whatever "most" machines want. Using #ifdef, as above, is the preferred way to do this, but sometimes that gets convoluted, in which case use

#ifndef SPECIAL_FOO_HANDLING
#define SPECIAL_FOO_HANDLING(pc, sp) (0)
#endif

where the macro is used or in an appropriate header file. Whether to include a small hook, a hook around the exact pieces of code which are system-dependent, or whether to replace a whole function with a hook depends on the case. A good example of this dilemma can be found in get_saved_register. All machines that GDB 2.8 ran on just needed the FRAME_FIND_SAVED_REGS hook to find the saved registers. Then the SPARC and Pyramid came along, and HAVE_REGISTER_WINDOWS and REGISTER_IN_WINDOW_P were introduced. Then the 29k and 88k required the GET_SAVED_REGISTER hook. The first three are examples of small hooks; the latter replaces a whole function. In this specific case, it is useful to have both kinds; it would be a bad idea to replace all the uses of the small hooks with GET_SAVED_REGISTER, since that would result in much duplicated code. Other times, duplicating a few lines of code here or there is much cleaner than introducing a large number of small hooks. Another way to generalize GDB along a particular interface is with an attribute struct. For example, GDB has been generalized to handle multiple kinds of remote interfaces -- not by #ifdef's everywhere, but by defining the "target_ops" structure and having a current target (as well as a stack of targets below it, for memory references). Whenever something needs to be done that depends on which remote interface we are using, a flag in the current target_ops structure is tested (e.g. `target_has_stack'), or a function is called through a pointer in the current target_ops structure. In this way, when a new remote interface is added, only one module needs to be touched -- the one that actually implements the new remote interface. Other examples of attribute-structs are BFD access to multiple kinds of object file formats, or GDB's access to multiple source languages. Please avoid duplicating code. For example, in GDB 3.x all the code interfacing between ptrace and the rest of GDB was duplicated in `*-dep.c', and so changing something was very painful. In GDB 4.x, these have all been consolidated into `infptrace.c'. `infptrace.c' can deal with variations between systems the same way any system-independent file would (hooks, #if defined, etc.), and machines which are radically different don't need to use infptrace.c at all.

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Do write code that doesn't depend on the sizes of C data types, the format of the host's floating point numbers, the alignment of anything, or the order of evaluation of expressions. In short, follow good programming practices for writing portable C code.