Next: Grade modifiers for pregenerated source distributions, Previous: Grade modifiers for single precision floats, Up: Grade modifiers [Contents][Index]
Mercury programs are intended to be debugged
using mdb, the Mercury debugger.
However, mdb treats non-Mercury code as a black box,
and cannot give any insights into its behavior.
.target_debugCompiling programs in a grade that
includes the .target_debug grade modifier
generates executables that are intended to be debuggable
with usual debuggers for the target language selected by the base grade.
This grade modifier is intended mainly
to help the implementors of Mercury itself debug interactions
between compiler-generated target code and the Mercury runtime system.
However, in certain rare cases, it may also be useful to other users
in debugging interactions between compiler-generated target code
and the contents of foreign_proc and/or foreign_code pragmas.
This grade modifier could be applicable to all base grades,
but is intentionally restricted to MLDS grades.
This is because in LLDS grades,
the assembler-like C code generated by mmc
will probably confuse debuggers such as gdb,
and it will definitely confuse
any Mercury programmer who is not a Mercury implementor.
The more idiomatic target language code
that mmc generates in MLDS grades
is still far from trivial for non-implementors to understand,
but at least they have a fighting chance.