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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

As someone who spends most of the time in *nix... Windows just sounds nightmarish to debug. The few times I've had to debug something in Linux kernel space I was super glad I had the full source code.

All that effort, and then... "the problem magically went away and we'll probably never know the true root cause"

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Windows has really nice tracing and WPA is pretty powerful. I've not yet seen a tool that is similarly easy to use on Linux. You can get most of the raw data from perf, but the tooling for analyzing the data isn't as good. I'd love to hear about a tool that for Linux allows doing Dawson's wait analysis easily if anyone knows of one.

I agree about the lack of source - it's really nice to be able to see exactly what the kernel is doing on Linux.

>I agree about the lack of source - it's really nice to be able to see exactly what the kernel is doing on Linux.

Debug symbols do help a ton on Windows.

That's definitely true, and the debug symbols story is better on windows (in my experience) than other platforms - AFAIK linux has no real equivalent to symbol servers.

Debian debug symbol packages are pretty nice [0].

But if you want a repository for your own debug symbols, multitude of symbol versions and ease of use then you're out of luck.

[0]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage

I have the opposite problem, spent most of my early career in win32 and x360. Having been on Linux derivatives for the last ~10 years I've yet to see debugging tools as good as Pix or Visual Studio.

Microsoft apparently makes symbols for Windows available, which is quite nice. On macOS you're often stuck with stripped binaries…

The tools described in the post are really good, as are a bunch of other MS debugging tools, but it is a world unto itself and unfortunately the best place to learn is in Redmond.

In the Unix world I feel similarly about things like dtrace. Amazing tool with a learning curve.

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