[Mono-dev] Porting Mono debugger to Mac OS X

[jonas echterhoff]

Hey everyone,

I'm working for Unity Technologies, and I am currently starting to  
port the mono debugger to Mac OS X, as we want to offer a proper  
debugging solution for users of the Unity game engine. So far things  
are looking alright, I've managed to make the debugger compile by  
adding some stub functions for the functionality which is different in  
OS X. So far, I see the following tasks which need to be done to get  
this to work:

-Make mono debugger read Mach-O binary format (shouldn't be too  
difficult, since bfd can read Mach-O).

-Replace missing ptrace functionality with Mach-O calls (ptrace exists  
on OS X, but is only partially implemented).

-Possibly reimplement libthread-db functionality somehow, as OS X  
doesn't have libthread-db (this i'm not quite sure about at the  
moment. Where and how is this used?)

At the moment, I'm coming along fine, currently i'm working on getting  
the Mach-O binary support to work, so this email is mostly just about  
introducing the project and saying hi. I'm sure I'll have a lot of  
specific questions further down the road. Fell free to give me generic  
advice on this task, if there's anything I should be aware of, though.

Cheers,
jonas