I went back and forth on using setuptools or autotools for the Python
extension, but I eventually settled on using only setuptools after
fighting to get the two to integrate well. However, setuptools is kind
of crappy; for one, it rebuilds every source file when rebuilding the
extension, which is really annoying for development. automake is a
better designed build system overall, so let's use that for the
extension. We override the build_ext command to build using autotools
and copy things where setuptools expects them.
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.
The lldwarf/drgn.dwarf split wasn't working out too well, and moving all
of drgn.dwarf into lldwarf (by rewriting it into C) would be way too
much work. Instead, use Cython, which results in a parser which is just
as fast but with much cleaner code overall. It also turns out lldwarf
wasn't doing GC right, so the switch also fixed that.
I wrote all of this code a few months back and am just now getting
around to committing it. The low-level DWARF parsing library is pretty
solid, although it only implements a subset of DWARF so far. The CLI and
higher-level interface are experimental.
