the-standup โ€” episode

Why Making a Debugger is So Hard! (ft Ryan Fleury)

#025 ยท August 22, 2025

Why Making a Debugger is So Hard! (ft Ryan Fleury)
Ship Faster with Neon Postgres #ad Neon comes with Branching, Schema Diff, and Instant Point-In-Time Recovery to help you ship fast and recover faster. Get the free plan at https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream 5 days a Week https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis ๐Ÿ“ Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:10 Printf Debugging 00:10:20 RAD Debugger Origins 00:25:00 PDB (Program Database) Limit 00:27:27 RAD Linker 00:28:40 Working for Epic 00:32:13 What the hell is MUMPS 00:33:28 D Sucks 00:34:45 Oodle Adjacent 00:35:40 How do steps work? 00:42:50 INT 3 Instruction/Trap 00:46:20 Step count 00:47:50 Overwrite and replace 00:49:42 The desire for user level INT 3 handling 01:00:39 Alternative to User level INT 3 01:03:10 Chrome Debugger complaints 01:07:51 RAD Debug features 01:16:52 Compatible languages 01:18:41 Gabe Newell annoucement strategy 01:19:37 Outro 1 01:20:01 Cleverer than Stack pointers 01:22:55 Prime pees on stream 01:24:20 Faking addresses and the shadow stack 01:27:50 Data breakpoints 01:28:38 Prime shoots his shot 01:32:46 TLDR 01:34:28 Debugging in VM langs 01:35:00 PUBE G 01:36:28 Outro 2