Rob Pike:

  I did the same to adb, which turned out to have a really good debugger
  hidden under a few serious bugs of its own, which I fixed.

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Memories.

Was it you who replaced ptrace with /proc in adb, or did I do that?

I do remember I was the one who took ptrace out of sdb (which a
few 1127-ers, or perhaps 112-ers on alice and rabbit still used).
After which I removed ptrace from the kernel, and from the
copy of the V8 manual in the UNIX room.  Conveniently ptrace
occupied two facing pages; I glued them together.

I also later did some work to try to isolate the target-dependent
parts of adb and to make them work in host-independent ways--e.g.
assembling ints byte-by-byte rather than assuming byte order--to
make it easier to make a cross adb, e.g. to examine PDP-11 or
68K core dumps on a VAX.

I miss adb; maybe it's time to revive it, though these days I'd
be tempted to rewrite it in Python so I could just load the right
module at runtime to pick the desired target.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON