I like writing unit tests and using lots of assert() statements while writing C++ code. This means I spend a lot of time looking at stack traces to figure out where my tests are failing. I got annoyed with having to run my programs from GDB, when all I really want is the stack trace, with the functions, files and line numbers listed.
A little bit of searching revealed a mailing list posting with a preload
library that will use glib's backtrace API to get a stack trace, and then use libbfd from GNU binutils to resolve file and line numbers. My system doesn't have this library, so I simplified it to only print the addresses. I then use a script to call addr2line to translate the addresses into line numbers. You can grab my code if you think it might be useful:
I would like to integrate code to resolve files and line numbers, so I did some digging for what libraries can read DWARF debugging info. It turns out that there are a few options out there. Basically none of them will permit you to use them with commercial code, except FreeBSD's libdwarf which may not be complete yet. This probably isn't a practical issue for me, but I still find it interesting that there are so few packages out there for this important part of the tool chain. Here is a list of related software projects that I found:
binutils: C, GPL
Contains libbfd, which is what GDB uses.
libunwind: C, X11
Get stack traces from current and remote processes. No debugging info.
Breakpad: C, BSD
Get stack traces, send them to a server. Seems to be able to get debugging symbols?
libdwarf: C, LGPL
A reference implementation of sorts.
elfutils: C, GPL + linking exception for OSI-approved licences that require source code distribution with binaries
No real web presence, but it is used in Frysk.
libdwarf: C, BSD
A FreeBSD implementation of dwarf symbol manipulation.
libcwd: C++, QPL
A C++ implementation of dwarf symbols.