[Mono-devel-list] Edit and Continue

[Paolo Molaro]

On 08/03/05 David Srbecky wrote:
> My name is David Srbecky and I am working on SharpDevelop 2.0 debugger.
> The debugger is getting nearly finished, but it is still missing one
> 'cool' feature - edit and continue. The support for Edit and Continue
> (EnC) from the side of Microsoft runtime is good enough, but there is no
> support at all from the compiler side - all the functionality is private
> and mostly part of VS. This effectively means that to support EnC, I
> must write my own compiler. I would never try to that, but fortunately
> there is mono to save the day. I would like to use the mono compiler to
> produce the necessary deltas, which I must feed to MS runtime. The
> problem is the I know neither the internals of mono compiler nor the
> internals of System.Reflection.Emit and implementing support of EnC
> would be a tedious or impossible task for me.

There is no documentation about what the MS runtime expects in the
edit and continue metadata tables. You could get someone living in a
free country to reverse engineer the metadata tables and write a spec.
Then we could start to see if the spec is easily implementable in
mono's reflection.emit code.
My guess is that it would be quite complex to implement _and_ make
it work with the MS runtime.

If people find the edit&continue feature useful, I suggest
implementing it in mono for mono (this of course requires people to
help the debugger folks first, though).

lupus

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