Building a Debugger • Sy Brand & Tim Misiak

GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Read the full transcription of the interview here

Sy Brand - Author of "Building a Debugger" and C++ Developer Advocate at Microsoft
Tim Misiak - Systems Engineer at Datadog and Co-Founder of Augmend
RESOURCES
Sy
https://bsky.app/profile/tartanllama.xyz
https://x.com/tartanllama
https://github.com/TartanLLama
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sy-brand-36520857
https://sybrand.ink
https://blog.tartanllama.xyz

Tim
https://bsky.app/profile/timdbg.com
https://x.com/timmisiak
https://github.com/timmisiak
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-misiak
https://www.timdbg.com

Links
https://dwarfstd.org
https://lldb.llvm.org
https://rr-project.org
https://undo.io

DESCRIPTION
Tim Misiak interviews Sy Brand about their book "Building a Debugger". Sy, who has a background in GPU compilers and debuggers, discusses how implementing a debugger offers profound insights into computer systems.
The conversation explores the unexpected complexities of debugging fundamentals like stack unwinding and code stepping. They examine how debugging interfaces have evolved and the challenges posed by backward compatibility and language evolution.
Sy highlights areas for future advancement in debugging, particularly time travel debugging for non-deterministic issues and better tools for debugging optimized code. Throughout the interview, both experts share fascinating technical details that reveal why debugger implementation serves as an excellent path to deeper understanding of operating systems and hardware.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Sy Brand • Building a Debugger
Cathy O'Neil • Weapons of Math Destruction

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챕터

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. How understanding systems unlocks better software (00:01:29)

3. Rethink debugging: Fixing ptrace, DWARF & adapting to modern languages (00:11:30)

4. Stepping through code: Unexpected complexity (00:20:03)

5. The future of debugging (00:30:58)

6. Outro (00:34:52)