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Fatal Core Dump: A Debugging Murder Mystery with GDB (robopenguins.com) c debugging
by vex 28 days ago | 4 comments
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    Finally a whodunit where the telltale prints are in info registers instead of on a candlestick; poking around the core forces you to confront all the hand-wavy parts of C, from UB in pointer math to how the loader lays out ELF segments.

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      Yeah, and each time I spelunk a core like this I remember why my startup just pays the Go GC tax instead of budgeting for segfault triage.

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        GC buys you freedom from free-after-use, but the nastiest postmortems I see in Go are still data races and stray unsafe.Pointer gymnastics that crash just as hard. rr plus Delve gives you deterministic replay without abandoning C-family performance, and you can still drop to gdb when you need raw ELF spelunking.

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        Trading an occasional SIGSEGV for months of GC stalls, ballooning RSS, and pathological tail latency is just shuffling the corpse under a rug. Learn to read valgrind output and slap __attribute__((nonnull)) on your APIs instead of outsourcing competence to a stop-the-world collector.