Some Assembly Required

The diagnostic file emitted by a crashing process in a modern operating system can contain a variety of useful information, including exception type, current instruction, CPU state, call stack, and sometimes the entire contents of the current thread’s stack or even the entire process heap. So why is it called a “core dump”? For years […]

The annotated slides for my “Forensic Debugging” GDC talk are now available here.

While debugging a smashed stack may seem like a heroic feat, the most heroic thing about my talk is the amount of time, effort, and care my friends spent to help me put it together. I would never have made it to the GDC, let alone made any sense whatsoever onstage, without the support of […]