Abstract

Dbx is the standard source-level debugger on most Unix 1 workstations. Over the past six years Dbx has grown from a debugger for interpreted Pascal programs to a debugger for compiled C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal, and Modula-2 programs. Dbx also has been retargetted to a variety of architectures, including VAX 2 , Motorola 68000 3 , MIPS, IBM RT-PC 4 , IBM 370, Sun SPARC, and Intel 80386. This paper describes the evolution of Dbx and examines how the organization of Dbx has enhanced its portability and extensibility. The structure of Dbx is based on a set of abstractions that define what a debugger must do, not on a decomposition by language or machine. These abstractions provide greater flexibility in handling the unexpected problems associated with retargetting a program. 1 Introduction Dbx is a source-level debugger that runs on most Unix systems. Compared with earlier Unix debuggers such as Adb [1] and Sdb [4], Dbx contains significant advances in the areas of portability, mult...

Citations

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