How can I get a backtrace on segfault?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 11:55:48 Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
> As an aside, I still think DMD needs an option to insert null checks
> everywhere, at least for debugging...

That would fix only a portion of segfaults, so as far as the general segfaults 
go, that's not a complete solution. Regardless of that however, Walter is 
dead-set against adding null checks, because his take on it is that the OS 
does them already (hence the segfault) and that you can always get the 
backtrace (along with other useful information) by using a debugger, so he's 
not going to add null checks.

Now, I do agree that it would be nice to have them for debugging purposes, but 
it's just not going to happen. Walter is too opinionated on the issue.

The way to get stacktraces for all segfaults is to add a handler for SIGSEV 
which prints a backtrace. And arguably, it's a better solution than doing null 
checks anyway, because it gives you a stacktrace without the extra overhead of 
doing the null checks. It is an OS-specific solution though.

- Jonathan M Davis