Haven't used debuggers or debugged a lot just yet, but I've had this question in my mind and I'd like to inspect some debugging information manually. Are there some kind of documentation or specification and are there a lot of information that is hidden in a an average "debuggable" binary?

On Friday, 13 May 2022 at 16:11:14 UTC, BoQsc wrote:

if you're on linux then the debug information are generated in a format that's well specified called DWARF.

DWARF essentially contain information about

• translation unit filename
• call stack
• each instruction of the runtime code is associated to a location (allowing to put breakpoints)
• the layout of user defined types (allowing to inspect instances)
• the inheritance chain of user defined types
• the variable types (alowing to inspect variables)

That's a lot of information, they non-trivially increase the size of the binary, but this is required to debug a program.

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