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Show HN: Unbug – Rust macros for programmatically invoking breakpoints

This project is inspired by some of the asserts in Unreal engine.

Due to reliance on core_intrinsics it is necessary to develop using nightly Rust, but there are stubs in place so a production build will not require nightly.

I recently released version 0.2 which includes no_std support and adds optional log message arguments to the ensure macro.

You could potentially build on stable Rust by emitting the breakpoint instructions yourself, at least on popular platforms. For instance, `core::arch::asm!("int3")` on x86, or `core::arch::asm!("brk #1")` on ARM.

Also, this is providing motivation to want to stabilize a breakpoint mechanism, perhaps `core::arch::breakpoint()`. I'm going to propose an API Change Proposal (ACP) to the libs-api team to see if we can provide that in stable Rust.

2 days agoby JoshTriplett

Rusts current pretty printers in lldb and gdb are just not good enough for a fluid step debugging experience. I've had luck with intellij IDE's but it's very sad that the best we can do in a language with such good devex tooling is print debugging.

Theoretically you could generate debug scripts with a macro and embed them with

  #![debugger_visualizer(gdb_script_file = "../foo.py")]

but I haven't seen anyone go through the trouble.

1 day agoby merksoftworks

I find myself using debug_here (https://github.com/ethanpailes/debug-here) which does similar things but for desktop-class debugging. It hasn't been updated in a while, but it still works for me on Windows at least.

2 days agoby xobs

Oh, that’s super clever integration with tracing. Feel free to send us a PR; we’ll link to this as a related project in the docs!

2 days agoby thramp

Neat project! Maybe this decision is copied over from unreal engine, but instead of `ensure` and `ensure_always`, having names like `ensure_once` and `ensure` would have been more clear to me.

1 day agoby nathanwh

We used to divide by zero but then someone decided that was ok.

1 day agoby dboreham

What does nightly mean ? I hate that you could not know a specific version of a nightly.

2 days agoby revskill

Is there a good newby tutorial on how to use debugger with Rust (and debugger in general?) No videos please.

1 day agoby ewuhic