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libunwind is awesome. It uses the same information for its job that the actual compiler uses for unwinding exceptions in C++, etc (DWARF .eh_frame & co). It's also much more portable these days (I believe backtrace() is glibc-specific). There are also remote unwinding capabilities I want to play with

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Darwin (iOS and Mac OS) have it too: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

Ah cool.

But I'm fairly sure that these days os x uses libcxx which uses libunwind

I seem to recall them implementing the unwind interface but with standard rbp/ebp unwinding. As in http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-498.1.1/gen... and http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-825.25/gen/...

My biggest problem with "standard" libunwind is how slow it is compared to a whole loop against the registers (which of course isn't reliable with -fomit-frame-pointer). IIRC, the gcc's call to backtrace actually parses DWARF to work around this (and thus is super slow).

Yes backtrace() and friends is a glibc thing, but libexecinfo tries to be compatible and portable. Back when I used backtrace(), that was about the best there was, and it was not that great really. I'm glad I know about libunwind now thanks to this post.

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