New BSD licensed debugger

[Roman Divacky]

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 ;)

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