Debugging Zig (with a debugger)

I agree with this sentiment, at the same time, there’s nothing stopping the next debugger from being written in Zig. It could support everything which GDB and LLDB cover already, as well as providing better hooks for languages those two aren’t doing as good a job with.

This would be many human-years of labor, of course, and just patching and extending LLDB might be easier. But a debugger is exactly the kind of low-level system-oriented programming which Zig excels at. Sometimes the right thing to do is start fresh, with a system which doesn’t fundamentally assume it will be looking at either C or C++, an architecture which lets languages register specifics in an extensible way which covers bases for the next language as well.

LLVM itself was Chris Lattner realizing that it would be more practical to re-engineer the entire C/C++ compilation chain from end to end, rather than try to get GCC to work the way he thought it should. There’s precedent.

better to start from