How does the open-sourced portable PDB from .NET team relates to this repo?

.NET Core introduces a new symbol file (PDB) format - portable PDBs. Unlike traditional PDBs which are Windows-only, portable PDBs can be created and read on all platforms.

https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/Documentation/diagnostics/portable_pdb.md

https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/src/System.Reflection.Metadata/specs/PortablePdb-Metadata.md

Will VC projects ever use portable PDB?

[skochinsky]

Portable PDB seems to be intended for CLI languages and does not offer any benefits for Visual C++ as far as I can see, so I doubt it.

One benefit I see is it's an open specification that contributors of tools (editors, symbol converters and such) can conveniently reason about and evolve by sharing their experience and even code contributions, if VC++ also embrace it. Compared to this, classic PDB (or full-PDB as the project system team chose to call it) does not provide additional benefit and hassle for Microsoft to maintain if moving forward, portable-PDB is the way to go in .NET Core as well as .NET Framework across operating systems).

[paddymcd-MSFT]

The Portable PDB was designed to serve as a debug file format for .NET binaries for cross platform purposes. As such it has a tight coupling with concepts that can only be relied upon in those binaries and which are not present in native images. This basically makes it a non-starter for C/C++

Full PDB

A generic symbol file format that only works on Windows but is supported by C/C++ toolchain as well as .NET Framework.

Portable PDB

A cross-platform, but .NET specific, symbol file format.

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If this is a correct understanding then I didn't knew about ".NET specific" bit. If it's so impartially .NET centric, then calling it "portable PDB" sounds like a wrong choice of name and confusing.

cc @tmat, @noahfalk

[eriawan]

@kasper3

yes, you are correct. Just for additional clarification, Portable PDB is PDB for .NET, and it is only targeted for .NET Core.

The definition is stated here: https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/Documentation/diagnostics/portable_pdb.md

.NET Core introduces a new symbol file (PDB) format - portable PDBs. Unlike traditional PDBs which are Windows-only, portable PDBs can be created and read on all platforms.

[pkrukp]

You can use it for .net framework (not only .net core).
Although I'm not sure if everything is working correctly, there's some discussion about it in microsoft/dotnet#529