alt Hacker NewsOne interesting thing about the dwarf format is that it is executable and Turing complete, running small programs on a virtual machine to figure out file names, line numbers and exception handling.
One interesting thing about the dwarf format is that it is executable and Turing complete, running small programs on a virtual machine to figure out file names, line numbers and exception handling.
It's really fascinating the different little evaluators that exist in DWARF. I started writing one for the DWARF expression format (https://github.com/tmcgilchrist/durin/pull/7) that I'm integrating with a debugger and free-monad/effect handler style code to lookup the missing data to provide for the Requires* callbacks.
Then there is the line number evaluation, which I haven't started on.
Building a Debugger by Sy Brand (https://nostarch.com/building-a-debugger) is an awesome book if you want to learn more about this. It covers DWARF 4 and you build a full debugger in C++17 for Linux/x86_64. Can't recommend that book highly enough!