Building a Go Debugger
Building a Go Debugger walks through the journey of building a debugger with first-class support for Go. The talk will briefly describe what a debugger is and how it works on Linux, ELF-based systems. We’ll then build off this to dig deep into some of the complex issues encountered. These issues include the encoding of debug information for complex Go types, extracting and unwinding goroutines and their state, extracting global and per-processor run queues and more. Finally, we’ll end with some of our motivations behind these efforts and the insights we’ve gained from them.
Abel Mathew is the co-founder and CEO of Backtrace I/O, where he and a team of folks are working on changing the way software is debugged and maintained. Prior to Backtrace, Abel was a Head of Engineering at AppNexus where he led a team of developers to improve ad optimization and reduce platform-wide costs. He spent multiple years as a developer and a team lead on AppNexus’ Adserver Team where he helped design and implement their low-latency advertising platform. Before AppNexus, Abel was a kernel module and tools developer at IBM and a server room monkey at AMD.