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Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

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Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#21

Post by bregma »

quotemstr wrote: post #6

It's not clear to me why we'd need a new debugger instead of GDB enhancements. GDB has an extensible, modern C++ codebase with literal decades of hard earned knowledge baked into it. How are we better off rewriting it, especially if the rewrite isn't memory safe?

Well, you can start by tearing down all the fences and firing that Chesterton guy's sorry ass. After all, even a 32-bit ARMv7 uses .eh_unwind sections to crawl the stack for a backtrace, right?

Then, you can focus on resolving edge cases that can cause papercuts. Make sure the solutions are at the expense of the happy path because that's all been solved long ago so there's no need to pay attention to it.

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#22

Post by modeless »

quotemstr wrote: post #6

It's not clear to me why we'd need a new debugger instead of GDB enhancements. GDB has an extensible, modern C++ codebase with literal decades of hard earned knowledge baked into it. How are we better off rewriting it, especially if the rewrite isn't memory safe?

GDB is awful and a replacement is sorely needed. It's buggy and slow and feature poor and has a terrible UI and a terrible API which makes all the frontends terrible in turn. I haven't looked at its code but I'm betting it's terrible too.

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#23

Post by gregthelaw »

modeless wrote: post #22
quotemstr wrote: post #6

It's not clear to me why we'd need a new debugger instead of GDB enhancements. GDB has an extensible, modern C++ codebase with literal decades of hard earned knowledge baked into it. How are we better off rewriting it, especially if the rewrite isn't memory safe?

GDB is awful and a replacement is sorely needed. It's buggy and slow and feature poor and has a terrible UI and a terrible API which makes all the frontends terrible in turn. I haven't looked at its code but I'm betting it's terrible too.

I haven't tried UScope yet (I shall), but I don't agree with you about GDB. I don't find it especially buggy unless doing niche things like non-stop debugging -- I guess you may well have a different experience though.

I think the UI is much maligned unfairly. It has a few quirks, but ever used git? For the most part it's fairly consistent and well thought through.

By terrible API you mean the Python? I admit it can be a bit verbose, but gives me what I find I need.

What features do you most miss? My experience is that most people use like 1% of the features, so not sure adding more will make a big difference to most people.

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#24

Post by Analemma_ »

godelski wrote: post #13

> Build as a library so other people can build other interesting things as well I LOVE this! I firmly believe so much tech has gone to shit because things are no longer hackable. We say "move fast and break things" but we try so hard to prevent that that when we do break things we just create bigger messes and debt, so no one cleans it up. It seems slower to write hackable code but that's in the moment. In the long r…

Is gdb another thing like gcc where the un-hackability and un-extendability was a deliberate choice by rms to ensure nobody would ever build proprietary toolchains on top of it?

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#25

Post by Agingcoder »

dima55 wrote: post #11
ziddoap wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this part of the post: > I've been building a debugger on my nights and weeks because it's fun

I'm considering the part that says "GDB and LLDB pain me greatly". This project both says "I'm doing this for fun" and "the state of the art is bad, and I'm trying to fix it", so this is a fair question. GDB is great. He says it crashes a lot, and cannot interpret some of his types. Maybe that's his experience, but I haven't had those issues after literally decades of using gdb. Some bug reports would be nice.

Decades for me as well, and we’ve had very different experiences : gdb is very powerful , but the user experience is atrocious and it does crash a lot.

To be fair, in a number of cases the type issues I had were not gdb’s fault but bad DWARF produced by the compiler.

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#26

Post by dooglius »

Analemma_ wrote: post #24
godelski wrote: post #13

> Build as a library so other people can build other interesting things as well I LOVE this! I firmly believe so much tech has gone to shit because things are no longer hackable. We say "move fast and break things" but we try so hard to prevent that that when we do break things we just create bigger messes and debt, so no one cleans it up. It seems slower to write hackable code but that's in the moment. In the long r…

Is gdb another thing like gcc where the un-hackability and un-extendability was a deliberate choice by rms to ensure nobody would ever build proprietary toolchains on top of it?

No, GDB has a pretty good Python extension framework

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#27

Post by feelamee »

> The available Linux debuggers are gdb and lldb. They both suck. They crash all the time, don't understand the data types I care about, and they don't make the data I need available at my fingertips as quickly as possible.

quote from https://calabro.io/uscope

Of course gdb, lldb have their problems (e.g. smashing tui with app output, what can be easily fixed, or very very very very long tab-tab completion, and crashing of course), but I dont know anything better. I am forced to use visual studio at work and its debugger really sucks - it can't even compare strings in conditional breakpoint, it cant even skip all std::function / std::bind garbage to let me step in callback, it can't watch evaluated expressions. Probably it can evaluate exprs (immediate window?), but there are very little guides about this.

So, gdb is winner for me now. rr (record-repeat)[0] also looks very nice, but it require hardware support(((

[0] https://rr-project.org/

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#28

Post by debatem1 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #24
godelski wrote: post #13

> Build as a library so other people can build other interesting things as well I LOVE this! I firmly believe so much tech has gone to shit because things are no longer hackable. We say "move fast and break things" but we try so hard to prevent that that when we do break things we just create bigger messes and debt, so no one cleans it up. It seems slower to write hackable code but that's in the moment. In the long r…

Is gdb another thing like gcc where the un-hackability and un-extendability was a deliberate choice by rms to ensure nobody would ever build proprietary toolchains on top of it?

I don't know if it was deliberate, but writing code that interfaces with GDB is unpleasant enough that I opted to build our debugger-like tooling in eBPF + pyelftools instead.

Re: Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

#30

Post by mplemay »

This opinion is not backed by facts, any insight about linux (or even the languages in question), or even related to this post. Nevertheless, I wonder if it was a good idea to allow rust contributions to the linux project. From all of the bits and pieces I read about zig (including this project), I feel like it would have been better aligned (than rust) to pick up where the mainly C codebase left off.
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