How do you debug and profile Odin projects? Let's collect apps and workflows!

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It’s all in the title: How do you debug and profile in Odin? What workflows are helpful to you and which programs do you use?

PS: My not so secret intent is to make a PR for the FAQ when/if there are enough answers, because to me this a fairly basic tooling question that I want answered for a language I want to work with.

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For debugging, RAD Debugger. It just recently got Odin support: GitHub - EpicGamesExt/raddebugger: A native, user-mode, multi-process, graphical debugger.

For memory leaks I just use a tracking allocator: Overview | Odin Programming Language

For profiling I use spall, which Odin has core support for: Spall | Odin Programming Language

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Keep in mind that I main Linux. Most of this also applies to FreeBSD. Probably to macOS as well if I’m not mistaken though I only have recently started dabbling in that. All of these tools are also general purpose; they have nothing to do with Odin and you could just as easily use them for programs compiled from C.

  • objdump for disassembly and checking symbols.
  • readelf to get general executable information, including symbol tables.
  • ldd to list shared object dependencies.
  • strace on Linux to observe syscalls and their results. picotrace on FreeBSD. Both of these tools have been very handy for debugging kernel-interfacing code.
  • lldb for step-by-step debugging, reading of registers, memory, and so on.
  • gdb if lldb has issues or is unable to get a stack trace which does happen rarely.
  • valgrind to record profiling statistics to be later viewed with kcachegrind.
  • prof to also record and view profiling statistics, as a second opinion.

That said, the sooner that the *nix-like operating systems get a competent visual debugger, the better. I don’t recommend using text-based debuggers if you have access to an alternative.

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For tracing procedures spall (or tracy) also work for linux. I used to use spall because the author has shared one of the versions for free, but now I don’t have a way to pay $100 for it so I’m not using it now.

On windows there’s also remedybg which is a fairly fast and snappy debugger, way better than visual studio debugger. Sadly it doesn’t support some of the advanced features like checking your TLS layout (?). I don’t remember what my issue was, but that one time I had to debug a buffer overwrite that corrupted the TLS, I had to do a bunch of math with numbers from objdump just to calculate its address.

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I started using gdb in emacs for debugging, and documenting my learning journey in this topic/thread : Debugging Odin using gdb

I also want to try out rr now that gdb works with odin build . -debug -o:none, that should allow reversible-debugging.
Like to use reverse-continue to identify the last writer to a watched variable, etc.

Example in that lightning talk : https://youtu.be/PorfLSr3DDI?si=JVqz1OZtRYrlYFcD&t=522

Why rr? Seems like rr is quite faster then gdb’s from what I’ve read. I’ll have to try both and compare too.

Have a great week :smiley:

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