Intro to Debugging X86-64 Assembly
nickdesaulniers.github.io
nickdesaulniers.github.io
Nice, that should be amusing to read. OSX is a very strange system -- it has two system call APIs (BSD, and Mach), which respectively have some very odd holes. Some of the OSX syscalls return values split between 32 bit registers instead of in a single 64 bit register, while others don't. Some of them return things by value, even though the C API specifies out parameters. And so on.
I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how this stuff works on OSX when writing Myrddin (https://github.com/oridb/mc). I've still got quite a bit more to do so that I can finish implementing libthread on OSX.
Anyways, your language looks cool!
I've got to get threads working, so maybe I'll have some info that can help, but I doubt it. I simply need to create and exit them, not implement all of pthreads.
But hey, at least Xnu is open-source. That's got to count for something....
Thankfully, that code was available -- without it, I would have had no idea that the 'stack' parameter for bsdthread_create would act as the stack size, instead of as the a pointer to the top (or bottom) of the stack.
Although, that being said, I'm currently still stuck on getting it working. The test for spawning threads is fine when I run it under 'sudo dtruss test/spawn', but as soon as it's not under dtruss, it fails to spawn the thread.
EDIT: when I say "some", I should probably post a link.
http://dyjakan.sigsegv.pl/ is the most comprehensive documentation that I've been able to find.
There's also syscalls.master in the xnu source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1504.3.12/bsd...
Ah, the fated Heisenbug.
I skipped over all of the calls in my dtruss example in this post, but I recall dtruss listing itself making a few syscalls. I wonder if a missing signal handler is to blame?
Also, thanks for pointing out Apple's pthread implementation! Great idea!
sudo dtruss -n myprocname
I jest, but great resources. I'm always impressed with debugging tools from Microsoft. The past couple of GDCs [0] I've spent lots of time in their booth fawning over the beautiful graphics debuggers. Sometimes, I wonder why we can't have nice things............OpenGL....all I wanted for Christmas was Vulkan....
What a wonderful bit of meta-defensive writing.