windbg used to offer scripting capabilities that teams could use to trigger validation of any number of internal data structures essentially at every breakpoint or watchpoint trigger. it was a tremendous way to detect subtle state corruption. and sharing scripts across teams was also a way to share knowledge of a complex binary that was often not encoded in asserts or other aspects of the codebase.

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bpye 5 days ago | parent [-]

This still exists? You can also use JavaScript to script/extend and there is a native code API too.

Note: I do work at MSFT, I have used these capabilities but I’m not on the debugger team.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

https://www.timdbg.com/posts/whats-the-target-model/

https://github.com/microsoft/WinDbg-Samples/tree/master

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coderatlarge 5 days ago | parent [-]

thanks for the pointers glad to hear it’s all still there

i haven’t seen this type of capability used in too many companies tbh and it seems like a lot of opportunity to improve stability and debugging speed and even code exploration/learning (did i break something ?)

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delta_p_delta_x 4 days ago | parent [-]

WinDbg also has time-travel/record-replay debugging.

	▲	coderatlarge 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		that sounds like a super-powerful feature especially for multithreaded debugging though i’ve never used anything like it.