#debug

Source Maps and DWARF for WebAssembly

§1 Provenance Chrome DevTools Wasm DWARF doc: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/wasm/ Chrome blog (2020) "Improved WebAssembly debugging": https://developer.chrome.com/blog/wasm-debugging-2020 Chrome blog (2019) precursor: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/wasm-debugging-2019/ C/C++ DevTools Support extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cc++-devtools-support-dwa/pdcpmagijalfljmkmjngeonclgbbannb Source maps v3 spec: https://sourcemaps.info/spec.html DWARF in Wasm extension (originally a custom section external_debug_info and embedded .debug_* sections): tracked at https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/main/Debugging.md Node Wasm debugging tracker: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/37984 §2 Mechanism / function WebAssembly debugging has two formats in flight: Source maps (the older approach) were originally designed...

CodeView and PDB

§1 Provenance LLVM PDB format documentation: https://llvm.org/docs/PDB/index.html llvm-pdbutil reference: https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-pdbutil.html Reid Kleckner (Google), "CodeView, the MS debug info format, in LLVM" (2016): https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/Slides/Kleckner-CodeViewInLLVM.pdf Microsoft cvinfo.h (CodeView record definitions): https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-pdb (the canonical reference dump from Microsoft, last published 2017, still authoritative) Format is owned by Microsoft and partially open. The "MS-PDB" specification was never formally published; the LLVM team reverse-engineered enough to produce a complete writer. §2 Mechanism / function Three...

DWARF 5 (and the DWARF 6 draft)

§1 Provenance Standards body: DWARF Standards Committee (independent since 2007), https://dwarfstd.org/ DWARF 5 spec (PDF): https://dwarfstd.org/doc/DWARF5.pdf DWARF 5 press release (Feb 2017): https://dwarfstd.org/dwarf5-press-release.html DWARF 6 working draft (May 2025 snapshot): https://snapshots.sourceware.org/dwarfstd/dwarf-spec/2025-05-05_22-29_1746484141/dwarf6-20250505-2228.pdf Errata: https://dwarfstd.org/dwarf5std.html Go reader: https://pkg.go.dev/debug/dwarf The committee includes representatives from Google, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, ARM, Sony, IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, and the LLVM and GCC projects. §2 Mechanism / function DWARF is a binary format for describing a...

Debug Info Formats