Improving Debugging For Optimized Rust Code On Embedded Systems

Abstract: Debugging is an essential part of programming. No debugger is good at debugging optimized Rust code, which is a problem because unoptimized Rust code is slow compared to optimized. The ability to debug optimized code is important for embedded systems because of the close relation to hardware. Therefore, a tool like a debugger is handy because it enables the developer to see what is happening in the hardware when debugging embedded systems.This thesis presents a debugger named ERDB and a debugging library named rust-debug. The goal of the library is to make it easier to create debugging tools by simplifying the process of retrieving debug information from the DWARF format. The goal of ERDB is to improve debugging for optimized Rust code.This thesis will explain the design and implementation of ERDB and rust-debug, and it will also explain how the debug information format DWARF works.ERDB will be compared to other debuggers to see if it has achieved its goal. The result highlight that the problem is in the compiler not generating the needed debug information.