Open
Description
Proposal Details
There seems to be a consensus it would be nice to have a new implementation of a gosym library, to address shortcomings of the existing one. There is a recurring interest in supporting inlined functions. There is a desire for more complete set of binary analysis libraries (x/debug). Datadog requires gosym library with low memory overheads, we just got our own implementation, that I am happy to adapt for other needs and upstream. Filing this now to start collecting information, I will share a concrete proposal later.
Initial bag of considerations, from the runtime meeting.
- Inlined tree parsing - must include inlined calls for pc lookups, must include inlined functions when listing all functions, may expose structured inlined tree data more directly
- Input - section data - should provide an easy entry point, possibly an adapter, maybe over an elf file, that is easier to use than requiring caller to provide correct byte slices; however must also allow providing or operating on mmapped section data; nice to have direct/helper functions support to provide right data given stripped binaries
- Memory overheads - nuance - should avoid allocating heap data structures, that scale with input size, up-front when parsing; heap data is okay for providing output, scaling with what was requested; constant overheads should be tolerable
- Older format versions - nuance - we should balance the code complexity and support for older versions (I retract caution from the runtime meeting - we might be fine with dropping support for some older versions)
- Code location - we lean towards creating a new package, rather than expanding current one, given a need to significantly expand/change existing interface; if we are clear on the interface, we might place it directly under debug/gosym2, if there is uncertainty we may start with x/