gdbstub VS noctane

now integrate gdbstub to support debugging code inside the emulator :)

Shameless plug, but have you considered integrating gdbstub rather than rolling your own debugger? I know a couple folks out there have successfully integrated it into their PS1 emulators with great success.

I've worked really hard to keep gdbstub panic free in its minimal configuration, going so far as to write some informal scripts that parse rustc's asm output to scan for the presence of panicking code paths.

crates.io | docs | repo

As a totally shameless plug, I'm the maintainer of gdbstub, a bare-metal, no_std, no_alloc, and size-optimized implementation of the GDB Remote Serial Protocol. One of the major changes slated for the upcoming release 0.6 is support for a new state-machine based API, which makes it possible to drive gdbstub directly via bare metal interrupt handlers (i.e: send/recv data over UART, handling breakpoints via the undefined instruction trap interrupt, etc...).

Continue working on a new API in gdbstub that'll make it easier to use directly from an interrupt handler when debugging code in a no_std, bare-metal OS environment.

I ran into almost this exact same problem while working on gdbstub, whereby I an API that allowed users to mix/match protocol features however they wanted, while also preventing users from accidentally implementing mutually-exclusive features. Moreover, I wanted to have a "zero cost" way to enable/disable API features without relying on cargo features. The solution I came up with is something I've been calling "Inlineable Dyn Extension Traits", or IDETs.

For a concrete example of how smart the Rust compiler is, I have a small writeup + test-repo that benchmarks a technique I came up with while working on gdbstub that [ab]uses the compiler's devirtualization and inlining optimizations to create runtime feature flags that are entirely compiled out if hard-coded to false at runtime.

If you want to check it out for yourself, the codebase is written in Rust and available at https://github.com/norepimorphism/noctane. If you don't want to mess with compiling (I don't blame you), a precompiled Windows executable of the debugger demo is available here.

I would really appreciate it if you did! What makes me happier than releasing software is seeing other people read and use it :). I would say I'm most proud of my algorithm for constructing a CD-ROM file system hierarchy, as well as the design of I/O registers, the workings of which is explained in a comment here.