Re: New BSD licensed debugger

On 29 Aug 2009, at 10:25, Roman Divacky wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 08:23:34PM +0100, Doug Rabson wrote:
>> As one or two of you know, I've been working recently on writing a  
>> new
>> debugger, primarily for the FreeBSD platform. For various reasons,
>> I've been writing it in a relatively obscure C-like language called D
>> (see http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/index.html for more details
>> including a free download of a FreeBSD D compiler.
>>
>> So far, I have a pretty useful (if a little raw at the edges) command
>> line debugger which supports ELF, Dwarf debugging information and
>> (currently) 32 bit FreeBSD and Linux. The engine includes parsing and
>> evaluation of arbitrary C expressions along with the usual debugging
>> tools such as breakpoints, source code listing, single-step etc. All
>> the code is new and BSD licensed. Currently, the thing supports
>> userland debugging of i386 targets via ptrace and post-mortem core
>> file debugging of same. I'll be adding amd64 support real soon (TM)
>> and maybe support for GDB's remote debugging protocol later.
>
> nice :)
>
>> If anyone is interested in taking a look at a 'Technology Preview',
>> I've put up a git repository at http://people.freebsd.org/~dfr/
>> ngdb.git. To build it you need to install 'omake' from /usr/ports/
>> devel/omake and you will need a D compiler. There are three options
>> there - DMD which you can download from
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/download.html is free, closed source and
>> works pretty well. GDC is a D front end  to GCC and you can find it  
>> in
>> ports - it works well enough but hasn't  been updated for ages.  
>> Personally,
>> I use LDC which is a D front end to  LLVM but that doesn't build  
>> out-of-the
>> box (I have a private hacked  version of LDC and some associated  
>> libraries).
>
> cool to see more LLVM usage in freebsd ;)

LLVM is cool. GCC generates better debugging information though :)

>
> fwiw there's also http://wiki.freebsd.org/TheBsdDebugger

I'm aware of it - not sure how active that project is. The web page  
hasn't changed in ages.