I've been working on getting my front end to generate the proper source-level debugging intrinsics, and I have a couple of observations:
1) I've never actually been able to get gdb to recognize my debug data. I've tried the various -O0 and disabling frame pointer elimination, and when I look at the assembly it seems OK, but gdb just won't recognize it. I've even tried downloading a more recent version of gdb, but unfortunately the latest official gdb release won't configure under OS X, and when I tried checking out the branch head it wouldn't compile.
2) It's very hard to determine whether or not the generated debug information is correct. One reason is that the way that debug information is encoded in LL files is essentially unreadable. I can look at a typical IR file and puzzle out what the code is supposed to be doing, but there's no easy way to look at the metadata and verify that it is correct.
What I would like to see is either (a) a way to encode debugging information in the module that is slightly easier on the eyes, or (b) some sort of pretty-printer utility that would take in a module and print a summary of the debug info for a given symbol.
-- Talin