New in Haiku: Debugger is now default

Blog post by 5004 on Mon, 2012-12-24 08:44

Just a few days ago, Rene Gollent switched on the Haiku debugger as the default debugger. Starting from revision 45032, whenever an application crashes, you will now get the option to debug it in Haiku's debugger. This milestone is important because it marks Haiku's debugger as ready for general use. Before Haiku used the command line tool gdb, which is very good but also very user unfriendly if you are used to a descent GUI debugger.

What changed?

Whenever an application crashes, you will see this dialog:

Debug dialog

If you click on the Save Report button you will be able to save a debug log to a text file, which you can attach to bug reports. If you click on the Debug button, instead of going to gdb, you will now open Haiku's Debugger:

Debugger window

Authors & code

Initial work on the debugger was done by Ingo Weinhold. Recently, Rene Gollent worked hard on getting the debugger into shape and getting it ready for release quality.

The debugger itself can be found at src/apps/debugger. The kernel support for debugging can be found at src/system/kernel/debug. There is a debug server that runs in the background and monitors which applications have crashed, and if so enables Debugger to take it over. It can be found at src/servers/debug.