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A retargetable debugger

1992; Association for Computing Machinery; Volume: 27; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1145/143103.143112

1558-1160

Norman F. Ramsey, David R. Hanson,

Distributed systems and fault tolerance

We are developing techniques for building retargetable debuggers. Our prototype, 1db, debugs C programs compiled for the MIPS R3000, Motorola 68020, SPARC, and VAX architectures. It can use a network to connect to faulty processes and can do cross-architecture debugging. 1db's total code size is about 16,000 lines, but it needs only 250–550 lines of machine-dependent code for each target. 1db owes its retargetability to three techniques: getting help from the compiler, using a machine-independent embedded interpreter, and choosing abstractions that minimize and isolate machine-dependent code. 1db reuses existing compiler function by having the compiler emit PostScript code that 1db later interprets; PostScript works well in this unusual context.