thorin is a simple debugger for linux and MacOS, like gdb's (very) little brother. It currently only works on C programs and x86_64 architectures.
thorin is still in development -- see the TODO section.
Get Rust and
cargo install thorin
thorin <target-program>
thorin will start the target program and wait for an exception, like a segfault.
If the program exits successfully, nothing happens.
If the program triggers an exception, thorin will suspend it and capture its state. You can inspect the program's state through the thorin console:
thorin> help
Commands:
(print|show|get) <variable-name>: Print the value of a variable.
read <address> <count> <type>: Read the value at <address>. <type>
is the type of the value, <count> is the
number of values to read.
help: Print this help message.
(exit|quit): Quit thorin.
In order to access variables and other source-level information, thorin needs to be able to read debugging information in the program's object file. To provide this information, all you need to do is compile your C programs with the -g flag.
cc -g [other flags] myprogram.c
As of now, you will probably have to invoke thorin as root on MacOS. I will eventually figure out how to get code-signing to work with Rust binaries.
There is no real reason to use thorin over gdb, lldb or other similar more powerful debuggers. I wrote this because
1. I wanted to learn Rust.
2. It was a fun exercise in system programming.
I chose the name 'thorin' because this program reads DWARF files (the predominant format for debugging information).