LLDB supports a broad variety of basic debugging features such as reading DWARF, supporting step, next, finish, backtraces, etc. Some more interested bits are:

  • Plug-in architecture for portability and extensibility:
    • Object file parsers for executable file formats. Support currently includes Mach-O (32 and 64-bit) & ELF (32-bit).
    • Object container parsers to extract object files contained within a file. Support currently includes universal Mach-O files & BSD Archives.
    • Debug symbol file parsers to incrementally extract debug information from object files. Support currently includes DWARF & Mach-O symbol tables.
    • Symbol vendor plug-ins collect data from a variety of different sources for an executable object.
    • Disassembly plug-ins for each architecture. Support currently includes an LLVM disassembler for i386, x86-64 , & ARM/Thumb.
    • Debugger plug-ins implement the host and target specific functions required to debug.
  • SWIG-generated script bridging allows Python to access and control the public API of the debugger library.
  • A remote protocol server, debugserver, implements Mac OS X debugging on i386 and x86-64.
  • A command line debugger - the lldb executable itself.
  • A framework API to the library.