Re: [boost] Is there interest in a collection of call stack utilities?

Subject: Re: [boost] Is there interest in a collection of call stack utilities?
From: Mathias Gaunard (mathias.gaunard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-03-03 06:56:05

On 03/03/13 10:54, Artyom Beilis wrote:

> You can also utilize function like backtrace_symbols. AFAIR not every platform has
> dladdr (Solaris if I recall correctly)

backtrace_symbols uses dladdr, and dladdr requires to link with -ldl, 
and is very limited in terms of what it sees. Also no debugging 
information is available.

The best way to get a list of symbols on Linux is unfortunately to 
extract the information from the executable and shared library binaries, 
as libbfd does.

I think the right approach is to separate the backtrace proper (list of 
addresses) from the mapping to names. Therefore 'backtrace' should be 
used, but not 'backtrace_symbols'.
'backtrace_symbols' is pretty bad anyway, you can do something better by 
calling dladdr manually.

(Solaris, and any other operating system with ELF shared object support, 
supports dladdr)

> Generally it is very interesting topic and very useful stuff (from my experience
> in deploy with CppCMS).

While it is interesting, I have not found it to be that useful in practice.
The debugger already does all of this better that you could ever do 
yourself.

It is probably a better idea to integrate your app with a debugger than 
to rewrite a debugger inside your app.