Jonas Devlieghere

Year in review: LLDB in 2025

This post summarizes the major areas of development in LLDB in 2025. I was inspired by Nikita Popov’s “This year in LLVM” and thought it would be interesting to do something similar for LLDB. My goal was to cover the whole project, rather than focusing on my own contributions.1 As the maintainer, I try to look at every single LLDB PR, but my level of engagement varies. I expect there will be a subconscious bias towards the efforts I was involved in. If there’s an area of work I didn’t include he

Syntax Highlighting in LLDB with Tree-sitter

LLDB comes with built-in syntax highlighting for C-based languages. It does so using the embedded clang compiler. Other languages following this model of embedding the compiler, such as Swift, can take a similar approach. Motivation There are two important use cases where relying on the compiler for syntax highlighting doesn’t work: Some languages, like Rust and Zig, don’t have their own type system and instead reuse the Clang type system. LLDB has the ability to create synthetic stack frames re

WebAssembly Debugging with LLDB @ FOSDEM 26

I’ll be presenting WebAssembly Debugging with LLDB in the LLVM Dev Room at FOSDEM 26 on Saturday, January 31st. Abstract WebAssembly support in Swift started as a community project and became an official part of Swift 6.2. As Swift on WebAssembly matures, developers need robust debugging tools to match. This talk presents our work adding native debugging support for Swift targeting Wasm in LLDB. WebAssembly has some unique characteristics, such as its segmented memory address space, and we’ll ex

Enabling MTE for the LLDB Test Suite

Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) is a hardware-based security technology to protect against memory corruption vulnerabilities. Memory allocations are tagged with a secret key. When memory is accessed, the hardware validates the tag, and if it doesn’t match, stops the process. EMTE is the foundation of Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE). It’s available on A19 and M5 processors or later. Using MTE for Finding Bugs (E)MTE is not just valuable in a security context. It was originally

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