On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 09:14:01AM +0530, Mayuresh Kathe wrote: > Since the elfutils project provides a Linux-only tuned edition of ELF binary > management toolkit, why does it not also include an assembler and it's > associated debugger? > > I understand that the AT&T mnemonics are something of a standard under Unix > and Unix-like operating systems, and that GNU binutils provides "as" for the > same, but since elfutils provides replacements for almost all of the > utilities from binutils why not an assembler too?
The simple answer is, not enough time. There is a start of an assembler/disassembler in elfutils/libasm. But the number of architectures it supports is currently very limited. Likewise for a full debugger. There is some support for debugger like functionality in the DWARF Frontend Library (libdwfl). But extending that to a traditional debugger is a lot of work. Although people have done something like that, see https://sourceware.org/systemtap and https://drgn.readthedocs.io. Cheers, Mark
