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Debugging symbols requirements: answers & comments

1. What are we doing?

We are working on identifying which metadata should solc emit as part of the compilation process to:

• 1.1. Make existing tools less fragile
  • Many tools depend on solc implementation details which are not considered part of of the compiler API. This leads to some of them breaking with new solc releases, degrading the users' experience and imposing high maintenance costs.
• 1.2 Make creating new tools easier
  • Creating tools that analyse Solidity requires knowledge of the internals of the compiler today. Some of them are documented, some of them aren't. This has a very steep learning curve. Having metadata explicitly designed for tool developers would lower it.
• 1.3 Make new kinds of tools possible
  • Giving new metadata can unlock the construction of new tools that are now impossible or require too much effort to be viable.
• 1.4 Give the compiler more flexibility
  • With better metadata, tools won't have to rely on solc compilation details. This will give the compiler more freedom to change things without breaking external tools, as long as the metadata is general enough and up-to-date.

2. Expected consumers of this metadata

While compilation artifacts' metadata is normally called debugging symbols, it's important to not restrict the scope of this project to debuggers, as other tools would also benefit from this. Examples of these tools are:

• Profilers
• Code coverage analyzers
• Stack trace generators

3. Status of this effort

We have identified a set of metadata requirements. This is just an initial version of it, and shouldn't be considered complete, nor necessarily correct.

4. Goals of this document