Headcrab

A modern Rust debugging library.

Goals

This project's goal is to provide a modern debugger library for Rust so that you could build custom debuggers specific for your application. It will be developed with modern operating systems and platforms in mind.

You can learn more about the goals and reasoning behind the project in the following blog posts:

• The Soul of a New Debugger
• A Future for Rust Debugging

Roadmap

List of phase 1 goals for the project:

• Modular API and extensibility.
• Read & modify memory of other processes and control their execution (cross-platform: x86_64 for Linux & macOS).
• Basic symbolication for Rust (read DWARF debug information and translate symbols into addresses).
• Get information about process threads.
• Read & write variables in the thread-local storage.
• Setting breakpoints at given locations.

Long-term goals:

• Rust expression parser (reusing MIR and other components from the Rust compiler).
• Read complex data structures.
• Make symbolication reusable for eBPF and dynamic tracing.
• JSON-RPC and support for Debug Adapter Protocol.
• Command-line interface.
• Collaborative debugging.
• Use the LLVM DExTer to improve user experience.
• Support more platforms and operating systems (Illumos, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows).

Contributing

Please follow the code of conduct for this project.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.