Demystifying Debuggers, Part 2: The Anatomy of a Running Program

rfleury.com

200 points·robenkleene··24 comments

If you're curious about learning how to use debuggers and getting more familiar with them, I came across https://microcorruption.com/debugger/Tutorial and found it to be quite fun and engaging.

For those who use debuggers regularly, would you be willing to share how you learned to use them or any tips and resources that helped you?

I also want to say that the effort behind articles like these is really appreciated. It’s valuable knowledge to share, especially since it seems like the friends I teach are more overwhelmed by them nowadays (maybe I just suck at teaching, but I'll keep trying).

> For those who use debuggers regularly, would you be willing to share how you learned to use them or any tips and resources that helped you?

I use debuggers a lot. I learnt the most when I implemented my own toy debugger. Everything made a lot more sense afterwards. It also made me realize that debuggers give you only a limited view of what is really going on in a CPU. If you want to truly understand how a program is executed on a CPU you'll need to learn a lot more about CPUs and likely about the specific CPU you work with.

That's a cool idea and I think a fair argument. I learned a lot from watching Ben Eater on YouTube, he manages to explain (and demonstrate!) how CPUs and many other components work really well.

Out of curiosity, what language did you write your toy debugger in?

Author, it would be helpful to link part 1 at the beginning of the article for people who missed it.

For those looking: https://www.rfleury.com/p/demystifying-debuggers-part-1-a-bu... :)

Thanks!

Debuggers are great, and even better with LLMs! https://github.com/plasma-umass/ChatDBG https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16354

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