[Dwarf-discuss] Re: dwarf2 question [abbreviations]

[Daniel Berlin]

> Normally the number of abbreviations for a single .o is quite small.
> And involves only very small abbreviation numbers.
> 
> If a compilation system were to somehow merge abbreviations tables
> a single table might grow large, but  that's off the point I think.

> 
> You will need to fall back to allowing arbitrary order when
> you find something out of order within a particular abbreviation table.
> 

I'm also not sure parsing abbrev tables is all that memory intensive.
Even in files with 500 meg of debug info, the .debug_abbrev section is
usually rather small (10 meg or less).

I actually wrote a python parser for dwarf2 using a modified version of
the struct module.
It built python functions to read a DIE based on the abbrev table on the
fly (python is cool), and kept a cache of the last 256 functions it
built.
Worked rather fast.