Building a Debugger
- title
- Building a Debugger
- type
- book
- summary
- Sy Brand walks through writing a Linux debugger in C++ — ptrace, breakpoints, DWARF unwinding
- author
- Sy Brand
- year
- 2024
- tags
- debugging, systems, low-level
- status
- want-to-read
- sources
- eatonphil-bookclub
- created
- 2026-05-12
- updated
- 2026-05-12
No Starch (2024). Sy Brand (Microsoft, C++ committee) walks the reader through building a working Linux debugger in C++: ptrace, breakpoints (software and hardware), single-stepping, DWARF unwinding, source-line mapping, expression evaluation. The closest thing to a modern equivalent of writing your own shell — the kind of one-tool-project that exposes what an OS actually exposes. On the eatonphil-bookclub speculative future list.
Related: syscall-binary-rewriting.
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