In the documentation, it reads:

The more fundamental reason to prefer the API mode is that the C libraries are typically meant to be used with a C compiler. You are not supposed to do things like guess where fields are in the structures.

This makes ABI mode sound extremely brittle, but other parts of the documentation also make it sound robust provided your headers are accurate. Is this mostly related to alignment and padding, and that being more likely to be incorrect in ABI mode/parsing headers?

I was mostly wondering if there's another in-between mode here, e.g. using gdb's python API + lookup_type provided debug symbols are included.