Introducing Delve: A Go Debugger

[Derek Parker]

I'd like to announce the beta release of Delve, the Go debugger I've been working on for some time.

https://github.com/derekparker/delve

It supports attaching to a running process, or it will start a process up for you and begin a debugging session. It supports all the standard debugger actions such as step, next, printing variables, printing status of all threads, and even printing the status of all goroutines.

The project is still definitely beta, but I feel it's at the point where it could actually be useful to Gophers. I started this project a while ago as a fun side project to work on and I feel like it's turned into something useful that to Go community could leverage.

Currently it will only build on Linux 64-bit (with trivial modifications to build on 32-bit systems) with support for OS X planned. Lastly, it supports basic variable evaluation, however support for more types and better scoping is planned as well.

Anyway, I hope people find it useful and I look forward to any issues, feature requests and pull requests!

[Markus Zimmermann]

Looks really nice. I tried it with some small examples. Looking forward to see more features!

I am wondering though why are you using the binary name "dlv" instead of "delve"?

[Derek Parker]

Cool, thanks!

The naming is mostly for convenience at the command line, honestly. It seemed easier to type 3 letters instead of 5, but with shell completion it's usually not that big of a deal.

[Markus Zimmermann]

The repository currently results into two binaries if your documentation is followed. "go get" runs build and install and since the main.go is in the root of the repository a binary called "delve" is automatically compiled. Doing "go build -o dlv ..." results into a second binary. I suggest that you put main.go and main_test.go into the folder "cmd/dlv" so go get builds the binary as "dlv". But my personal opinion is that the name "delve" is just fine.

[Derek Parker]

That's a good point, I may just update the README to specify using delve at the command line.

[Bruno Medeiros]

An obvious question: Why not use GDB? Or improve GDB's support for Go?

[Damian Gryski]

On Wednesday, August 5, 2015 at 4:55:43 PM UTC+2, Bruno Medeiros wrote:

An obvious question: Why not use GDB? Or improve GDB's support for Go?

Rob Pike laid out the reasons in https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/UiVP6F-9-yg/lqS3sbyfTZMJ

Damian

[Chris Hines]

Derek also talked about his reasons at GopherCon. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InG72scKPd4

[Haddock]

Delve is really what Go needed. Awesome! Are there some plans to support remote debugging? I don't even know enough about Go to be able to say whether that is feasible at all. But it would be really needed.

Thanks, Haddock

[Giulio Iotti]

On Thursday, October 1, 2015 at 9:51:44 AM UTC+2, Haddock wrote:

Delve is really what Go needed. Awesome! Are there some plans to support remote debugging? I don't even know enough about Go to be able to say whether that is feasible at all. But it would be really needed. 

AFAIK Delve is a client/server over HTTP: remote debugging should work out of the box.

dlv debug -headless -listen :8181 ... # Start the debugger server

dlv connect localhost:8181 # Connect to debugger server

-- 

Giulio Iotti 

[xn0...@gmail.com]

SWEET!!!
Patrick your dlv slogan should be:
"Delve debuging Go the right way "