Introspection via Self Debugging

The omnipresent support for introspection in modern programming languages indicates the usefulness of the tool. [2, 3, 8, 9] Unfortunately, C, which is one of the most pervasive programming languages and the foundation of nearly every modern operating system, does not support introspection. I propose to bring introspection to the C language via a novel application of an old tool: the debugger. Debuggers have long had access to the type and naming information which is needed for introspection. On most UNIX platforms, this is accomplished by the debugger reading any DWARF [4] symbols which may be present in the target binary. These symbols can be leveraged to gain the information which is needed to create a full-featured introspection API.