CppCon 2018

Debuggers are one of the most important tools in the engineering arsenal. However, today's popular symbolic debuggers have evolved little beyond their predecessors of three decades in the area of performance and static analysis. You don't have to wait tens of seconds or minutes to iterate on your builds with a debugger or bottleneck the debugging process when domain expertise is lacking. 

After exploring problems in these areas, the talk examines technical hurdles to building faster debuggers and illuminates our journey in building a modern symbolic debugger that is magnitudes faster than existing debuggers. Finally, with performance improved, viable opportunities for marrying static analysis with symbolic debugging are explored. These techniques are currently being used and deployed in the wild for companies such as Comcast, Oath, AppNexus and more.

Topics to be covered include: GDB and LLDB performance, debugger internals, memory allocator internals, alias detection for post-mortem analysis and more. The audience will walk away with an improved understanding of debugger internals, debug information formats and learn several new techniques for static analysis of post-mortem state.