[Dwarf-discuss] Enhancement: DWARF Extension Registry

[David Blaikie]

On Fri, Dec 1, 2023 at 1:43 PM David Anderson via Dwarf-discuss <
dwarf-discuss@lists.dwarfstd.org> wrote:

> On 12/1/23 05:24, Ben Woodard via Dwarf-discuss wrote:
> > My reasoning is that the reason why we are running out of vendor defined
> > space is that within in the various vendor spaces the encoding space is
> > consumed by legacy extensions that:
> > 1) were never implemented publicly
> > 2) were implemented but are no longer in use because the compilers that
> > generated them have been abandoned
> > 3) were in use but have been incorporated into the standard version of
> > DWARF.
> >
> > I feel like clearing those out by drawing a line in the sand and saying
> > that extensions which existed in previous versions of DWARF do not
> > necessarily mean the same thing once the new version of DWARF is
> > released, should clear out the legacy cruft such that there should be
> > sufficient encoding space for new producer extensions.
> >
>
> While clearing-out of attributes etc that were never implemented
> makes sense,  I think the rest of this goes way too far in
> re-using things.   There is a distinct danger of making
> it impossible for a consumer to read DWARF3 once DWARF6 is complete.
> That seems to me to be a bad idea. Unappealing.
>

Not sure I follow this - you could still read DWARF3 as DWARF3 no matter
what changes in DWARF6, I think? Could you flesh out what you're thinking
here/how DWARF6 completion could (if we took some of these suggestions)
cause DWARF3 to be impossible to consume?
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