Author: nanxiao

delve is a debugger developed in Golang and also dedicated to help trouble-shooting Golang programs (Home page is here). Though it is still in pre-1.0 release, I think it is stable enough for daily use. BTW, if you find some bugs, you can report it to developers and help to make delve more stronger! P.S., Albeit fmt.Print buddies are useful in most cases, I strongly recommend you try to usedelve to inspect the internal mechanism of your code, because it can help you know Golang deeper, not just superficial stuff.

Installing delve is very simple: taking Linux platform as an example, it is no different from setting up other Golang projects, just “go get” is enough:

go get github.com/derekparker/delve/cmd/dlv 

Now, in $GOPATH/bin, there is an extra dlv executable binary file (Notice: the project is named delve, while the executable file is calleddlv. I even made a foolish mistake when began to use it).Run dlv command, and it will show you a detailed manual of delve:

# dlv
Delve is a source level debugger for Go programs.

Delve enables you to interact with your program by controlling the execution of the process,
evaluating variables, and providing information of thread / goroutine state, CPU register state and more.

The goal of this tool is to provide a simple yet powerful interface for debugging Go programs.

Usage:
  dlv [command]

Available Commands:
  version     Prints version.
  run         Deprecated command. Use 'debug' instead.
  debug       Compile and begin debugging program.
......

Let’s check this artificial Hello.go program:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
        var s []byte
        s = append(s, []byte("Hello, Debugging!")...)
        fmt.Println(string(s))
}

Use delve to debug it:

# dlv debug Hello.go
Type 'help' for list of commands.
(dlv) help
The following commands are available:
    help (alias: h) ------------- Prints the help message.
    break (alias: b) ------------ Sets a breakpoint.
    trace (alias: t) ------------ Set tracepoint.
    restart (alias: r) ---------- Restart process.
    continue (alias: c) --------- Run until breakpoint or program termination.
    step (alias: s) ------------- Single step through program.
    step-instruction (alias: si)  Single step a single cpu instruction.
    next (alias: n) ------------- Step over to next source line.
    threads --------------------- Print out info for every traced thread.
    thread (alias: tr) ---------- Switch to the specified thread.
......

If you are familiar with gdb, you will find the commands are very similar, and I promise you can master delve soon.

An interesting thing is that the delve doesn’t provide start command which gdb offers, so you should try to set breakpoints first, then run continue command:

(dlv) b Hello.go:8
Breakpoint 1 set at 0x4011ea for main.main() ./Hello.go:8
(dlv) c
> main.main() ./Hello.go:8 (hits goroutine(1):1 total:1) (PC: 0x4011ea)
     3: import "fmt"
     4:
     5: func main() {
     6:         var s []byte
     7:         s = append(s, []byte("Hello, Debugging!")...)
=>   8:         fmt.Println(string(s))
     9: }
(dlv) p s
[]uint8 len: 17, cap: 32, [72,101,108,108,111,44,32,68,101,98,117,103,103,105,110,103,33]
(dlv) goroutines
[4 goroutines]
* Goroutine 1 - User: ./Hello.go:8 main.main (0x4011ea)
  Goroutine 2 - User: /usr/local/go/src/runtime/proc.go:263 runtime.gopark (0x42a153)
  Goroutine 3 - User: /usr/local/go/src/runtime/proc.go:263 runtime.gopark (0x42a153)
  Goroutine 4 - User: /usr/local/go/src/runtime/mfinal.go:144 runtime.runfinq (0x413f80)

Cool! Isn’t it? Now You can observe almost everything you want to know about your program.

Happy Debugging! Happy delving!