Lua scripted watchpoints in LLDB (GSoC 2021)

["Shichu Yang (Siger)" <sigeryeung@...>]

Hello!

I am Shichu Yang, a student developer in the GSoC 2021 project "Lua scripted watchpoints in LLDB". You can just call me Siger.

The project is supposed to interact with both Lua and LLVM community. LLDB from LLVM project is a powerful debugger, especially with its scripting features. The main scripting language within LLDB is Python. However, Lua is almost available as an alternative language though part of features are still missing. For example, breakpoints in LLDB can have a Lua callback when they get hit, while watchpoints did not support Lua callbacks before the project.

In this project, we made watchpoints in LLDB able to accept Lua callbacks, and improved scripting-related documentation of LLDB to introduce Lua scripting features to more users. These changes have been already merged. Moreover, after extending the project goals, we are very happy to tell you that LLDB module will be ready to work in standalone Lua. That is to say, once you `lldb = require('lldb')` in Lua, then you will have the full access to all LLDB APIs (e.g. start a new target, attach to a process, set breakpoints, dump memory and more). Currently, the pull request which exposes LLDB module to Lua have not been merged yet, but it will be landed soon.

For more details, you can check the showcase page for the project. Here is the project repository for progress tracking purposes.

Mentors: Pedro Tammela and Jonas Devlieghere.

Siger