aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/libbacktrace/README
blob: 6225f92b855e1f8ffaec9ad01818b5d4d7dd6d44 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
The libbacktrace library
Initially written by Ian Lance Taylor <iant@golang.org>

The libbacktrace library may be linked into a program or library and
used to produce symbolic backtraces.
Sample uses would be to print a detailed backtrace when an error
occurs or to gather detailed profiling information.
In general the functions provided by this library are async-signal-safe,
meaning that they may be safely called from a signal handler.

The libbacktrace library is provided under a BSD license.
See the source files for the exact license text.

The public functions are declared and documented in the header file
backtrace.h, which should be #include'd by a user of the library.

Building libbacktrace will generate a file backtrace-supported.h,
which a user of the library may use to determine whether backtraces
will work.
See the source file backtrace-supported.h.in for the macros that it
defines.

As of October 2020, libbacktrace supports ELF, PE/COFF, Mach-O, and
XCOFF executables with DWARF debugging information.
In other words, it supports GNU/Linux, *BSD, macOS, Windows, and AIX.
The library is written to make it straightforward to add support for
other object file and debugging formats.

The library relies on the C++ unwind API defined at
https://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi-eh.html
This API is provided by GCC and clang.