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by rockdoe 1472 days ago
Reminds me of "Your program shouldn't have bugs in it isn't an acceptable position to take for a debugger", from the rr folks. Unfortunately I can't find the source of the quote any more, but it stuck in my mind.
3 comments

Yeah computing backtraces in a crashreporter is extremely similar to a debugger in that you need a lot of fudge-factor heuristics and fallback modes for known toolchain bugs or common corruptions.
You're probably remembering https://pernos.co/blog/tzcnt-portability/
Speaking of the rr folk, they also had the fascinating point that you can reliably generate a "stack trace" by figuring out which `call` instructions were executed with what values (also other jump instructions I suppose), instead of walking the stack. Thereby skipping the whole "parsing the stack is insanely difficult and unreliable" issue.
FWIW, that's from pernosco, not rr.
I think it's the same people?
It is. rr records the trace and the Pernosco converts it into a database that can be queried.