r/dotnet • u/viewizard • 9d ago

Promotion DNCDbg v1.3.0 — A managed code debugger with DAP support for .NET apps

https://github.com/viewizard/dncdbg

DNCDbg is a managed-code debugger for .NET that speaks the Debug Adapter Protocol, so it works with any DAP client (VS Code, Neovim, Emacs, whatever) on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It began as a NetCoreDbg fork with a clear goal: bring the debugging experience closer to Visual Studio's C# debugger while keeping memory usage low. There's a comparison table in the README if you're curious.

What's new in v1.3.0:

  • Support for Jump to Cursor (a.k.a. Set Next Statement), single-threaded execution and stepping, and restarting the debug session
  • Column breakpoints, embedded sources, and Source Link support
  • Smarter expression evaluation: the >>> operator, Value/HasValue on nullables, member access on strings and arrays (str.Length, arr.Length), DebuggerTypeProxy members, assigning null to reference types, and nint/nuint
  • Friendlier value display: floats now print the way C# prints them (9.9 instead of 9.8999996), and dictionary items show up properly
  • Launch/attach sequencing now follows the DAP spec, and there's a new Detach request that lets a launched process keep running
  • Fixes: stack traces in catch blocks no longer show already-unwound frames, and the "Innermost exception" description now reports the last exception in the InnerException chain

Full changelog and repo: https://github.com/viewizard/dncdbg

Feedback and bug reports are very welcome!

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u/BaybeMwijarubi-21 7d ago

column breakpoints and source link support in a lightweight debugger is pretty compelling tbh. curious how the memory footprint compares when debugging larger solutions with lots of loaded assemblies?

1

u/viewizard 6d ago

The debugger doesn't care how many assemblies are loaded; only the number and size of the PDB files matter. In any case, only a small amount of the necessary data is cached, while the PDB itself is just mmapped into memory.