Re: Is sdcc + gputils + gpsim useful ?

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 14:45 -0700, Scott Dattalo wrote:
> <I'm resending this because apparently the first attempt failed (because I
> believe of a reason on my side).>
> 
> Peter,
> 
> Perhaps your subject should read "how can we make sdcc+gputils+gpsim
> *more* useful?" ?

Yes you are right !

>  I think your main concern is how can we get gpsim to
> automatically view source files regardless of how those sources were
> compiled, assembled, or linked to generate the PIC firmware.
> 
> Ideally, the linker should create a file that contains all of the symbolic
> information that the simulator and other back end tools need. If this
> statement is true, then SDCC should not be affected at all. As it
> currently stands, the .cod symbol files do contain paths to source .asm
> files and to the .inc files.

I'm not sure that the path information is there.  Using gpvc on a couple
of .cod files...

First on test18F1.cod that was assembled from test18F1.asm
Source File Information
------------------------
 
test18F1.asm
/usr/local/share/gputils/header/p18f458.inc

Secondly on led.com that was compiled form led.c
Source File Information
------------------------
 
led.asm
crt0i.asm
crt0i.asm: No such file or directory

It seems from this crude test that there is no path information stored
for .asm files !  Maybe this is a bug ?

>  I haven't used SDCC in quite a while, nor
> have I used gplink's library capabilities. But I would assume that if a
> library has been created with symbolic information then the paths to
> assembled .asm files should be present. However, libraries do present an
> interesting problem in that there's really no good way (other than
> embedding all of the .asm/.c source) of ensuring the installed library and
> the code from which is built track one another. I suppose a process could
> be put in place to copy of all of the source files into a directory and
> instruct the resulting library to point its paths at that directory (or
> equivalently build the library from the copied directory).

Looking at some of the other target architectures for sdcc I think they
DO put copies of the library source code into
the /usr/local/share/sdcc/lib/src/<architecture> subdirectories.


> Incidentally, the library search path has come up before for gpsim with
> regards to module libraries. As a result, the gpsim invocation option '-L'
> allows one to specify a list of colon separated directories that can be
> used for searching. Perhaps that option can be extended to mean 'source
> directories' too.
> 
> Scott

So, do you think it is worth trying to sort out some way of making sdcc
+ gputils + gpsim EVEN MORE useful ?  ;-) 

Peter