rust-minidump VS breakpad

The folks at firefox has enough of a sample size that lack of ECC RAM actually matters for them. As in they keep receiving unexplainable crash dumps, especially AFTER they switched to Rust -- until they realized what was going on. Now their Rust minidump project does a bitflip check.

Generally what we do when we fall back to scanning depends on the architecture. For x86 you can find the logic here: https://github.com/rust-minidump/rust-minidump/blob/77638ab7...

Since we do post-hoc stack walking our ability to actually look at the assembly is limited. In most cases where we have no CFI we also do not have the binary to begin with, so we're in random memory land.

Another onr is Raygun. Although it doesn't have an SDK itself, it shows how you can integrate your software with Google's breakpad and send the crash report via an http request.

Google also has projects like this: https://github.com/google/breakpad

It supports 5 platforms, but uses 4 completely different build systems, including 2 custom ones (3 if you count depot_tools). There is very little overlap between the platform versions, meaning it's effectively 5 different projects smashed together into a single folder, and pretty much no way to use them in a cross platform project without some serious work. There isn't even a basic abstraction over the similar callback APIs between the platforms, although that's not a huge deal because the effort to write a basic abstraction layer is nothing compared to the effort of getting to a point where you can actually use it in a cross-platform project.

It's also funny that one of the build systems is GYP, which is basically a reinvention of CMake, except it's only used for the Windows build even though it can generate projects for the other platforms. Also, the VS project generator for GYP has been broken for a while (simple typo, trying to import OrderedDict from the wrong module. There's a PR to fix it, hasn't been merged for some reason), so it doesn't even work. Beyond that, it's also broken because GYP forces treating all warnings as errors, with a whitelist of warnings, yet the latest version (since yesterday at least) fails to build (tested on VS2019) because there's a warning that isn't in the whitelist.

You could try to fork it and fix these issues, but depot_tools doesn't provide a way to change the clone URL for repos, meaning you need to dig through the source code and wrap it in your own script that interacts with the internal APIs to do a simple clone (hint: fetch.py has a 'run' method that you can call with a custom constructed 'spec' object, which is a dictionary where you can inject your own url; just look at the hard-coded spec object for breakpad as a starting point). If you don't use depot_tools, then you need to manually clone all of the dependencies in the project since they're not even set up as git submodules.

There's also no versioning scheme whatsoever. Depot_tools seems to automatically checkout the latest version of everything (including itself).

I spent the past week wrestling with this monstrosity. Ended up successfully writing a Conan package for it that builds for Windows and Linux (there's one on Conan center, but it only supports Linux). I have 3 more platforms to go, but I think it'll be a better idea to just scrap everything and refactor into something more reasonable using CMake.

Instead of Breakpad, they also have a newer one called Crashpad, which is meant to improve reliability on Mac OS. Unfortunately, it depends on Chromium, so it won't work for my purposes.

...so all I'm saying is, maybe don't use Google as a role model for your project infrastructure.

/end rant

I don't think you're accomplishing this without writing a least a little bit of C at some level. but I'd use this if for some reason you cannot connect a third party.