Developing own Debugger

[Darshan Kutagulla]

Hi All,

I would like to develop my own debugger and I need assistance in achieving this.

Why am I trying to reinvent the wheel?
Example: I want to know/learn how to get the information about the data members of a class dynamically and programmatically during the runtime.
Say I have a class A and I am using it in my program to create an an object, say A myObj; But I dont know what are the members of the class A. I want to know this programaitally. Please help.

Note: Class A might not be declared/defined in my own program.Its very likely that I am using it from another dll or program, for which I dont have the source code or header file.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks and Regards
Darshan Kutagulla

[1yR4jE8b]

Personally, I don't know anything about it but I have a good idea where to start. You can start by reading the source code of GCC and GDB, both are open source so getting the source is easy.

From my understanding, it's the compiler's job to embed the debugging information into the executable, so reading the documentation and sourcecode on how GCC does this would be a good start.

Then, I would start reading the parts in GDB where it extracts this information from the executable and go from there.

[morus]

Apart from the fact that your question looks a bit silly (You wouldn't ask it when you would be able to do it), I didn't got the point. If you are lucky, reverse engineering of a DLL or application is possible with existing debuggers/binary tools by inspecting myObj (e.g. "print myObj" in gdb) but chance is high that you have a stripped version without symbol information.