It was likely me, as I did a lot of work on the program, but I don't claim
that I was the one.

There is a db (the Plan 9 derivation of adb) in plan9port, but it struggles
with modern binaries.

-rob


On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 5:00 AM Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote:

> Rob Pike:
>
>   I did the same to adb, which turned out to have a really good debugger
>   hidden under a few serious bugs of its own, which I fixed.
>
> =====
>
> Memories.
>
> Was it you who replaced ptrace with /proc in adb, or did I do that?
>
> I do remember I was the one who took ptrace out of sdb (which a
> few 1127-ers, or perhaps 112-ers on alice and rabbit still used).
> After which I removed ptrace from the kernel, and from the
> copy of the V8 manual in the UNIX room.  Conveniently ptrace
> occupied two facing pages; I glued them together.
>
> I also later did some work to try to isolate the target-dependent
> parts of adb and to make them work in host-independent ways--e.g.
> assembling ints byte-by-byte rather than assuming byte order--to
> make it easier to make a cross adb, e.g. to examine PDP-11 or
> 68K core dumps on a VAX.
>
> I miss adb; maybe it's time to revive it, though these days I'd
> be tempted to rewrite it in Python so I could just load the right
> module at runtime to pick the desired target.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
>