Unify the .NET platform debugger story

[ghuntley]

overview

What use is an open-source programming language that can only be debugged with proprietary software? This is not a problem for languages that .NET competes against in mindshare (Golang/Rust). Why did dnSpy, MonoDevelop, Linqpad, JetBrains & Samsung have to reinvent the wheel? It's 2021 and the .NET platform is fractured at a foundational level.

https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/wiki/Microsoft-.NET-Core-Debugger-licensing-and-Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Code

options

• The now archived+retired project dnSpy has a powerful .NET debugger and is one of the most advanced as it supports the impressive stuff , like tuple element names and async stepping. Unfortunately it is released under GPLv3 license whereas the rest of the platform is released under MIT. Maybe the author would consider relicensing this component?
• Samsung has a debugger that provides GDB/MI and VSCode Debug Adapterprotocol and allows to debug .NET apps under .NET Core runtime. It is released under MIT.
• Jetbrains could do the community a solid and open-source their debugger.
• Microsoft could do the community a solid and open-source their debugger.
• MonoDevelop has a .NET debugger (which needs work)

discussions

More people should be pissed off about the debugger situation - @directhex

relevant issues

• Kindly reconsider the licensing for .NET Core debugging libraries dotnet/core#505

additional material

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/sos-debugging-extension

[filipnavara]

Note that there is couple of active dnSpy forks, eg. https://github.com/dnSpyEx/dnSpy.

[anaisbetts]

https://github.com/dotnet/diagnostics/tree/main/src/SOS is a very relevant piece of code here, it is the low-level guts of what you would use to implement a debugger specifically for .NET, it's even tied to lldb so technically .NET has a fully open-source debugger, just not one that's very pleasant to use.

I suspect that the best way forward here would be to find a nice lldb frontend (kdbg maybe?) and try to start adding UI for SOS commands