GDB loses significant functionality when debugging binaries that lack debugging symbols

IMHO from experience with other debuggers, GDB is actually hostile to debugging at the Asm level, due to many perplexing design choices which may or may not be deliberate. Things like needing to add a superfluous asterisk when breakpointing on an address, the "disassemble" command not being able to do what it says and instead complaining about a lack of functions, etc.

I read “pwndgb” as Welsh for a good 5 seconds before realising which site I was on.

I’m curious how this compares with https://github.com/mahaloz/decomp2dbg

maybe a hated take but: debugging with symbols is like playing a shooter with aimbot. i don't feel GDB has many issues. you can trace program execution, put breaks, disassemble. what more do you need?

I don't think needing symbols is a debugger problem. a lot of code that needs reversing / debugging doesn't come with any debug information. Is that really the problem of a (simple) debugger? GDB is a 'simple' debugger, and it does what it says on the box. It doesn't try to interpret stuff for you.

The difficulty with tools like IDA and binary ninja is that a lot of the heuristics it uses to pull debugging info for you, are basically guesstimates it makes. They usually do not come with guarantees of correctness. What GDB provides you, is mostly correct, albeit much more limited. You really need to dig into the sources of these other tools to understand how its doing its guesswork, and if that's what you trust and want. Do you know all the ways your tools uses to guess what it's looking at? Do you want to reverse your tools to find out? In GDB, you can (and must) use your own wits (and feverish note taking) to do this work.

The smarter your tool seems, the more 'interpretation' it does. which might not be what you need. If you run on a common OS target, with a sanely built binary, it might help a lot. But if you want to look at weird binaries or targets, it's imho better to do this work yourself. (I do like me a good headache though - that might be different for other ppl.)

all in all, ofcourse, there's good use-cases for each tool, and ofcourse a big part is personal taste - if you do debugging / reversing for a living I totally get you might want a tool that does more for you out of the box. GDB does little. It doesn't claim to do more

As for this work done integrating binary-ninja with pwndbg. that's pretty epic still regardless of my sad opinions ;)! Great job! Know a lot of ppl are going to love it.

sounds like an interesting direction, but I don't understand why should we have it coupled to specific tool (pwndbg)? Why not implement a BinaryNinja plugin to dump all user-defined names (function names, stack variables), together with an original (stripped) binary to the new ELF/.exe file, with symbol table and presumably with DWARF section?

This is really cool. Anyone know what license level of binja is required? Does it work with the free edition?