Hard Coded Breakpoints
This little line of code totally saved me this week:
__asm int 3;
I'm writing a plugin to an existing Windows application and I could not, for the life of me, figure out if my plugin was even being loaded or if it was executing properly. All I knew was that I wasn't seeing the behavior from my plugin I expected. I needed to step through my plugin with a debugger, but since it loads as part of another app I didn't know how to get the debugger to break. Setting breakpoints in Visual Studio wasn't working.
Fortunately for me I have smart teammates, and one of them taught me this little trick to programmatically insert a hard coded breakpoint into your code. If I add this line, when my code runs the breakpoint is triggered and the application stops executing, with a dialog giving me the option to debug it in Visual Studio. When I get in there, behold: The cursor is pointing at that line of code and I can step through my plugin.
Since then I've done a bit more research and found out that, in truth,
__asm int 3;
is really only meant for x86 architectures. A more portable way to do this for Windows is:
__debugbreak();
which invokes the correct assembly interrupt for the current architecture.
On Linux, apparently you can do this:
__asm__("int $0x03");
although I haven't tried it. It looks enough like the x86-only version for Windows that it makes me wonder if it would work on x64 architectures; I'd love to hear back if anyone knows for sure.
Also, interested to know how to do this on OS X. Comment or mail if you know.
Go – Programming Language Nirvana?
The Go Gopher
Earlier this week Google announced their new programming language, called Go.
Usually I don't get too worked up about programming languages. I already feel like I know more languages than I should need to know, and often a new language seems to me like "Hey, check this out! Here's a more complex or non-intuitive way to accomplish a task you already know how to accomplish, but in a language you will never use professionally!"
I know, I'm disappointing you.
But Go! Oh my, this seems different. From the blog post:
Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical...
Wait! Hold on there — my heart just skipped a beat and it freaked me out. Can you please repeat that again?
...a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++.
Ooh baby. Someone help me — I'm shaking with anticipation. A systems programming language that combines Python and C++? Can it really be? It seems too good to be true! My two favorite programming languages combined in one: It's like true programming nirvana!
