A C library that may be linked into a C/C++ program to produce symbolic backtraces
Initially written by Ian Lance Taylor [email protected], then forked by Rust developers in May 2018 and forked again by Nim developers in February 2020 (because the Rust people moved on to their own implementation). Ian started writing his own version of macOS support, a couple of days before this last fork was made. If that's successful, we'll be happy to go back to using upstream.
This is version 1.0. It is likely that this will always be version 1.0.
The libbacktrace library may be linked into a program or library and used to produce symbolic backtraces. Sample uses would be to print a detailed backtrace when an error occurs or to gather detailed profiling information.
The libbacktrace library is provided under a BSD license. See the source files for the exact license text.
The public functions are declared and documented in the header file backtrace.h, which should be #include'd by a user of the library.
Building libbacktrace will generate a file backtrace-supported.h, which a user of the library may use to determine whether backtraces will work. See the source file backtrace-supported.h.in for the macros that it defines.
As of January 2018, libbacktrace only supports ELF, PE/COFF, and XCOFF executables with DWARF debugging information. The library is written to make it straightforward to add support for other object file and debugging formats.
The library relies on the C++ unwind API defined at https://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi-eh.html This API is provided by GCC.