1<!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">
16         <!--#include virtual="sidebar.incl"-->
17		<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>
58                </div>
59      	</div>
60	</div>
61</div>
62</body>
63</html>
64