I'm sitting on my lazy ass, drinking coffee, and hanging out with my son. So, I figured now was a good time for a quick Lysa update.

If you follow the stream, you will know that I've been hacking away at things like user-defined types, arrays, pointers, and the like. Everytime I think I've got things figured out, the complexity of making a debugger slaps me in the face and wakes me up.

There is a long ride ahead of us, but we're creeping closer to a prerelease version every day. I'm also particularly interested in making Lysa close friends with 4coder. Of course, the motivation is mostly selfish, but maybe some of you will enjoy the pairing as well.

Keeping Track of Progress

You're welcome to check in on the Lysa Trello board to make sure I'm not slacking. I tried to use labels that hint at how long I expect features to take. If you're a special kind of insane, you might add up the amount of time you expect it all to take

Hello again Handmade humans,

I recently laid out a strict schedule for streaming Lysa development, so if you wanted to know if you can make a future stream, now you can find out.

Stream Schedule

Weekdays: 12:30 - 14:30 Central Time

As for other types of streaming, those times are a surprise because I never know when I'll have some quiet time around the house to hop on Twitch (which reminds me, you can also watch me on YouTube live).

Regarding YouTube Videos

If you're working hard instead of hardly working, you can also catch the Lysa Recap videos that I put on YouTube along with the Lysa Archives. The former are 3-5 minute recaps of what I did on stream and the latter are just exported stream videos.

My YouTube channel is primarily focused on Lysa development videos, but I do have some non-Lysa video series ideas.

Quick Development Update

For the first

Slow and steady wins the race, as they say. Lysa progress has been chugging along at a steady pace as I try to keep up with a rigorous schedule of streaming every day (insert Rocky training montage here).

I've been implementing DWARF instructions over the last week(ish) and it's going pretty smoothly. However, like the genius that I am, I've decided to just implement most of them without testing them thoroughly. There are a couple reasons for this, but I expect Lysa to explode when I finally plug in the DWARF VM. It'll be great.

The exciting part about this VM nonsense is what it will do for Lysa. On Linux, executable files are encoded with ELF information that tells the OS how to run the file. When you add debug symbols, you get DWARF information which includes "location lists." These are what tell the debugger where to find important things in memory. Once we can evaluate DWARF expressions, we can evaluate location lists (lists of DWARF expressions) that tell us where to find t

That's right folks, after starting Lysa, formerly known as Gungnir, almost exactly one year ago (initial commit was on 27 Feb, 2016), we finally decided it was time to announce the project.

Don't be fooled, there hasn't been a year of full-time work on the debugger, but it has been growing off and on for the last 12 months. It all started with trying to understand wtf the ELF data could tell us. Then we moved onto dabbling with DWARF information within the ELF data (neckbeards are really good at naming things). Next was fiddling with Linux system calls like ptrace. And all along the way we wrestled with designing the API.

Lysa is by no means finished. There are many months ahead before we can say that, but we aren't too far from a prerelease build that you can actually use. Currently, our North Star includes a few more features and tweaks before Lysa can be held within your hands and fiddled with. ;-)

Anyway, enough rambling. This post is just to let the communit