VC8-compatible debugging in the works!

[Vikas Kumar]

On 3/22/06, Peter Johnson <peter at tortall.net> wrote:
> The only feature still somewhat missing is the ability to add hints to
> generate additional debug information, like marking certain labels as
> functions, marking data in certain ways, etc.

Well, if one can figure out lexical blocks and entry points in the
text section, based on the existence of a stack frame creation or the
ENTER instruction and map it to the CALL/Jcc instructions, 85% of the
time functions and lexical blocks can be detected. the rest 15% of the
time, the assembly programmer might be doing something tricky. Various
compilers use different tricks. Gcc generates symbols pretty well, but
for example ifort (Intel Fortran) generates lots of extra symbols for
the same code for which g77 will generate much lesser symbols.   But
even then, this is assuming that the user uses labels and not direct
addresses or relative addressing in CALL and JMP instructions