I've been planning to make memory readers pluggable (in order to support
use cases like, e.g., reading a core file over the network), but the
C-style "inheritance" drgn uses internally is awkward as a library
interface; it's much easier to just register a callback. This change
effectively makes drgn_memory_reader a mapping from a memory range to an
arbitrary callback. As a bonus, this means that read callbacks can be
mixed and matched; a part of memory can be in a core file, another part
can be in the executable file, and another part could be filled from an
arbitrary buffer.
The current mixed Python/C implementation works well, but it has a
couple of important limitations:
- It's too slow for some common use cases, like iterating over large
data structures.
- It can't be reused in utilities written in other languages.
This replaces the internals with a new library written in C, libdrgn. It
includes Python bindings with mostly the same public interface as
before, with some important improvements:
- Types are now represented by a single Type class rather than the messy
polymorphism in the Python implementation.
- Qualifiers are a bitmask instead of a set of strings.
- Bit fields are not considered a separate type.
- The lvalue/rvalue terminology is replaced with reference/value.
- Structure, union, and array values are better supported.
- Function objects are supported.
- Program distinguishes between lookups of variables, constants, and
functions.
The C rewrite is about 6x as fast as the original Python when using the
Python bindings, and about 8x when using the C API directly.
Currently, the exposed API in C is fairly conservative. In the future,
the memory reader, type index, and object index APIs will probably be
exposed for more flexibility.
