Demystifying Debuggers

And there is a brand new book with more than 700 pages about how to build a debugger by the same Author with a lot of additional information (see https://nostarch.com/building-a-debugger); I recently bought it and can highly recommend it.

I have bought the book months back and I think I recently received an email that the final version was released.

Anyways I can recommend it even though I am not finished with it yet.

I think there's two 'poles' here--'good' in terms of feature rich, sure, there's loads of it.

'good' as in performant--an area that game dev types (rightly, IMO) criticize and harp on? There's far less of it, video games aside.

Think of the perceivable slowness of many web application you use daily, Windows 11's, well, everything UI-related, etc.

Hell, my 3 year old iPhone can't scroll Uber Eats at 60fps consistently. Is 'Uber eats' 'good'? From a functionality standpoint, yeah, of course. But is displaying a list of images and text and expecting it to scroll smoothly too much to ask?

Software can be 'good' in terms of functionality offered and 'bad' at the same time, depending on your perspective.

IIRC I think Mr Fleury has a background in game-dev, so his perspective is totally understandable. Modern games are remarkable feats of software.

Thinking selfishly, the absolute quantity of good/bad software isn't as important as the software you have to interact with on a day-to-day basis. Good software is invisible and under-appreciated, you use it for it's purpose and move on, bad software really sticks out.

It’s a good question, what exactly is this decay and why is it called undeniable? Is that even true? If I think back on what programming was like thirty years ago up through today, everything about computing has steadily improved, gotten easier, more reliable, and higher quality, on average. All operating systems crash a lot less often than they used to. Computing devices from desktops & laptops, to phones, to routers & NASes, to household appliances, have all become faster, better, cheaper, and have more features and higher utility.

There are some ways I could see the author being somewhat justified, especially when it comes to the need for debuggers. Software is getting more layers. The amount of it and the complexity of it is going up. Debuggers are super useful for helping me understand the libraries I use that I didn’t write, and how my own code interacts with them. There are also a lot more people writing code than there used to be, and because the number of people writing code has been growing, that means the distribution skews toward beginners. I feel like the number of languages in popular use is also going up, and the diversity of coding environments increasing. I don’t know that I would frame all this as ‘decay’ but it does mean that we’re exposed to higher volumes of iffy code and abstractions over time.

> there has never been more good software

Right. It's incredible that something like Linux is free. For a more recent example, look at Vs code. An even more recent example, look at how many open weight llms there are out there.

Relevant: Denuvo Analysis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226406 - Jun, 2025 (136 comments)

I think it’s referring to this: https://www.radgametools.com/

I've used kd/windbg at Microsoft, lldb at Apple, gdb at Intel; WinDbg(Next) and kd are still my absolute favorite.

Coolest feature of windbg is time travel debugging - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...