[Dwarf-discuss] Additional values for DW_AT_accessibility

[Martin]

Hi,

Thanks for looking into it.

On 25/04/2026 03:17, Ben Woodard wrote:
> I guess these have ABI implications as well and so they probably would need to be tracked so they would need to be available for tools like libabigail.
>
> While a tool like gdb probably wouldn’t care about the difference between “Private” and “Strict Private”, libabigail would need know if a member or a method changed from one to another. This would likely be more of an API level ABI change rather than a structural or calling convention change.

I am no expert on the ABI question. My involvement comes from 
maintaining a debugger.

gdb does show the information on request (and so does "FpDebug", the 
debugger for which I would like to use this):

ptype TFoo
type = struct TFoo : public TObject {
   protected:
     LongInt ABC;
   private:
     LongInt Bar;
}

That is what brought my attention to the absence of them.


> Do you think we really need “Published”? I can’t see any reason why that one is needed in DWARF.

As I said, not an expert on API, but from a quick Google, this is purely 
cosmetic. (as the documentation says, for actual access its the same as 
public).

Tools relying on the generated RTTI don't (to my knowledge) rely on 
DWARF. So it would be only for a debugger to show the info as above.