LLVM is once again participating in Google Summer of Code (GSOC). For 2024 we have an exciting project to enrich the disassembler in LLDB. The project consists of using the variable location information from the debug info (DWARF) to annotate LLDB’s disassembler (and register read) output with the location and lifetime of source variables. You can find all the details on LLVM’s Google Summer of Code Ideas & Projects page....
Today Google announced the list of open-source organizations participating in the 2021 Google Summer of Code program. Together with Raphael and Pedro, I’ll be mentoring the following two projects: A structured approach to diagnostics in LLDB Lua scripted watchpoints in LLDB If you’re interested in either of these projects or have questions, feel free to reach out. For more information about GSoC itself check out the Summer of Code website.
To make incremental builds fast on macOS, the static linker (ld) ignores the debug information. It can easily be a magnitude bigger than the rest of the program and slow down link time. Instead the linker emits a debug map which contains the location of all the object files it relocated so that debug info consumers (such as the debugger) know where to find the DWARF debug info. This approach works great during development and greatly speeds up the build-debug cycle....
If you’ve ever used the debugger, chances are you’ve used a file and line number to set a breakpoint. Most of the time this provides enough granularity. Sometimes, though, more fine grained control would be helpful. Consider the following example: 1 int foo() { 2 return 1; 3 } 4 int bar() { 5 return 2; 6 } 7 int baz() { 8 return 3; 9 } 10 int main(int argc, char** argv) { 11 return foo() + bar() + baz(); 12 } Line Breakpoints Let’s say we want to step into the function baz on line 11 and can’t set a breakpoint on baz itself....
LLDB is the debugger developed as part of the LLVM project. It is probably most known as the debugger in Xcode, but many use it as an alternative to GDB. Scripting in LLDB One thing that makes LLDB really powerful is how scriptable it is. It has a stable C++ API, called the SB API or Scripting Bridge API, which is accessible through Python. Following LLVM’s model of reusable components, most of LLDB constitutes a debugger library and the SB API is how tools like the command line driver interface with it....
Python has great interoperability with C and C++ through extension modules. There are many reasons to do this, such as improving performance, accessing APIs not exposed by the language, or interfacing with libraries written in C or C++. Unlike Python however, C and C++ are not memory safe. Luckily, great tools exist to help diagnose these kind of issues. One of those tools is ASan (Address Sanitizer) which uses compiler instrumentation to detect memory errors at runtime....
Today marks my one year anniversary at GuardSquare. On the one hand it feels like yesterday (as cliché as that might sound) but on the other hand it feels like ages ago, considering how much we have been able to do in just one year’s time. For those that don’t know GuardSquare yet, allow me to quickly introduce our company. If you have ever used Java, you probably know ProGuard, our open source optimizer for Java bytecode....
Pointer analysis is an important topic in compiler optimization. One interesting aspect is the dynamic scope of pointers. LLVM differentiates between two situations: Pointer Capture: A pointer value is captured if the function makes a copy of any part of the pointer that outlives the call. Pointer Escape: A pointer value escapes if it is is accessible from outside the current function or thread. The latter case is sometimes considered separate and called thread-escape....
In a previous blog post I wrote about bitcode. Embedding it was already possible for quite some time with Apple’s fork of LLVM that ships with Xcode. Recently, Apple upstreamed (parts of) their implementation making it possible to do the same with the open source clang compiler. However, there are some differences between the two implementations. Bitcode embedded with Apple’s version of clang is bundled into a xar-archive. Metadata such as compiler commands used to create the binary and dylibs which the code linked against, are kept in the archive’s table of content....
Little over a year ago, Apple announced at WWDC 2015 the ability to embed bitcode in Mach-O files. Bitcode is the intermediate representation used by the LLVM compiler and contains all the information required to recompile an application. Having the bitcode present, in addition to machine code, Apple can further optimize applications by compiling and linking specifically for the user’s target device. This is one approach to app thinning, which aims to achieve smaller binaries and therefore more free space on your iDevice....