Crate backtrace

A library for acquiring a backtrace at runtime

This library is meant to supplement the RUST_BACKTRACE=1 support of the standard library by allowing an acquisition of a backtrace at runtime programmatically. The backtraces generated by this library do not need to be parsed, for example, and expose the functionality of multiple backend implementations.

Implementation

This library makes use of a number of strategies for actually acquiring a backtrace. For example unix uses libgcc's libunwind bindings by default to acquir a backtrace, but dladdr is used on OSX to acquire symbol names while linux uses gcc's libbacktrace.

When using the default feature set of this library the "most reasonable" set of defaults is chosen for the current platform, but the features activated can also be controlled at a finer granularity.

Platform Support

Currently this library is verified to work on Linux, OSX, and Windows, but it may work on other platforms as well. Note that the quality of the backtrace may vary across platforms.

API Principles

This library attempts to be as flexible as possible to accomodate different backend implementations of acquiring a backtrace. Consequently the currently exported functions are closure-based as opposed to the likely expected iterator-based versions. This is done due to limitations of the underlying APIs used from the system.

Usage

First, add this to your Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
backtrace = "0.1"

Next:

extern crate backtrace;

fn main() {
    backtrace::trace(&mut |frame| {
        let ip = frame.ip();
        let symbol_address = frame.symbol_address();

        // Resolve this instruction pointer to a symbol name
        backtrace::resolve(ip, &mut |symbol| {
            if let Some(name) = symbol.name() {
                // ...
            }
            if let Some(filename) = symbol.filename() {
                // ...
            }
        });

        true // keep going to the next frame
    });
}

Traits

Frame	A trait representing one frame of a backtrace, yielded to the trace function of this crate.
Symbol	A trait representing the resolution of a symbol in a file.

Functions

demangle	De-mangles a Rust symbol into a more readable version
resolve	Resolve an address to a symbol, passing the symbol to the specified closure.
trace	Inspects the current call-stack, passing all active frames into the closure provided to calculate a stack trace.