Re: [INFO WANTED] Source Level Debuggers

Rob Scott <scott@iqsoft.hu> wrote:
> I would like pointers to information on how Source Level Debuggers work.


I requested similar information a while back. Here is a summary of
the information I received. The VAX Debug reference (see below) is
useful as is the gdb internals paper by Pizzi. Thanks again to those
who responded to my original post.






From: "George C. Lindauer" <gclind01@starbase.spd.louisville.edu>
Subject: Re: debugger literature


Simple command-line debuggers that don't deal with symbolic info are
pretty easy to write. Just looking through someone's code once gives
you the basics. Simple symbol tables shouldn't be much different than
what you would use in constructing a compiler... except they have to
be memory-resident at run-time. I put a debugger source on the net;
it's very like DOS DEBUG but is for 32-bit applications. You can find
it at ftp.std.com;/pub/os-code/oskdl10.zip; it's buried in the directory
structure but the directory is called 'debugger' or 'monitor' or something
like that. I also wrote a 68K version which I'm still releasing sources
for, for the moment.


>From kadhim@spock.cs.colorado.edu Fri Feb 9 11:57:26 1996
Reply-to: kadhim@cs.colorado.edu


@InProceedings{VAXDEBUG,
    author = "Bert Beander",
    title = "{VAX} {DEBUG}: An Interactive, Symbolic, Multilingual
                                    Debugger",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGSOFT}/{SIGPLAN} Software
                                    Engineering Symposium on High-Level Debugging",
    year = 1983,
    organization = "{ACM}",
    month = aug
}


The above proceedings contain a number of useful articles.
To look at a real working debugger, gdb is a possible start. It has
some documentation of its internals:


@Unpublished{gdb,
    author = "Robert Pizzi",
    title = "{GNU} Debugger Internal Architecture",
    note = "Department of {A}pplied {S}cience, {U}niversity of
                                    {C}alifornia at {D}avis, {L}awrence {L}ivermore {N}ational
                                    {L}aboratory.",
    year = 1993,
    month = dec
}


About dbx:


@InProceedings{Dbx,
    author = "Mark A. Linton",
    title = "The Evolution of {Dbx}",
    pages = "211--220",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the {USENIX} Summer Conference",
    year = 1990,
    organization = "{USENIX}",
    month = jun,
    note = "In Anaheim, California"
}


For a number of old references:


@Article{Glossary,
    author = "Mark Scott Johnson",
    title = "A Software Debugging Glossary",
    journal = {SIGPLAN} Notices,
    year = 1982,
    volume = 17,
    number = 2,
    pages = 53,
    month = feb
}


>From basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr Fri Feb 9 03:43:46 1996
Subject: Re: debugger literature


>>>>> "Craig" == Craig H Smith <chsmith@hopper.unh.edu> writes:


        Craig> I'm looking for references on general debugger
        Craig> implementation -- nothing too esoteric. I've looked
        Craig> through some literature but they stay focused on the
        Craig> typical stages of compilation.


I have very few references. Here they are.


@InProceedings{Golan:Duel:93,
    author = {M.Golan and D.R.Hanson},
    title = {DUEL: a very high level debugging language},
    booktitle = {Proc. Winter USENIX San Diego},
    year = 1993,
    month = {jan}
}


@InProceedings{Hotzle:debug:92,
    author = {U.Hotzle and C.Chambers and D.Ungar},
    title = {Debugging Optimized Code with Dynamic Deoptimization},
    booktitle = {Conf. Programming Language Design and
                                    Implementation 1992},
    editor = {ACM SIGPLAN},
    year = 1992,
    organization = {ACM},
    where = {runtime1}
}


@InProceedings{Tolmach:debug-SML:90,
    author = {A.P.Tolmach and A.W.Appel},
    title = {Debugging Standard ML without Reverse Engineering},
    booktitle = {ACM conf on Lisp & Functional Programming (Nice,
                                    France, 1990)},
    year = 1990,
    month = {june},
    where = {runtime1}
}


--
-------------------------------------------------------------
Craig Smith Personal address
Graduate Student by request only
Computer Science
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH
chsmith@hopper.unh.edu Carpe A Cappellam
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