The RAD Debugger / Linker v0.9.27-alpha

Debugger Changes

• Added preliminary support for symbol servers. First, the debugger can attempt to download debug info for any module via the Download Module Debug Info command (also accessible by right-clicking a module). Second, the debugger can be configured to automatically do this for all modules which don't have debug info via the Auto Download Debug Info setting. The local cache path and server URLs used by the debugger for downloading symbols are parsed from the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable. If that environment variable is not configured, then it falls back to the defaults of C:/SymbolCache and https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols.
• Added the ability to disambiguate symbol names by module name, debug info name, or compilation unit name in expressions. This can be done using the usual syntax, e.g. my_module.dll!foo, or my_unit.obj!foo. : can also be used instead of !.
• Added the ability to redirect debug string output to any label on a per-target basis. Those labels can then be evaluated in any watch window or text visualizer. By default, all targets write to output, which is automatically visualized by an Output tab. But if you want different targets to route their debug output to different buffers, you can name the buffers differently, and then view those in separate text views.
• Added a Run To Name command.
• Added an Auto Load Last Project setting, which will automatically load the most recently loaded project on startup (the old behavior pre-0.9.26). This setting is off by default.
• Added right-click menus for watch expressions, to easily find them in a memory view, or to break when their value changes.
• Improved the stability of the step-over-line operation. Our stepping algorithm would sometimes cause spurious (and rarely, non-spurious) access violation exceptions when a thread would try to execute at address 0x38f. This most regularly surfaced when an exception on one thread (like a breakpoint being hit) would interrupt stepping on another thread. This has been resolved, and stepping in such scenarios should be much more reliable.
• Adjusted the default dark theme.
• Made several UI visual improvements.
• Adjusted evaluation visualizations to include fully qualified symbol names. (#809)
• Fixed an issue which would rarely cause steps to take a long time.
• Drastically improved memory usage of PDB -> RDI conversion for some workloads, notably PDBs with many small compilation units.
• Fixed a few issues relating to offline symbol evaluation (evaluation of symbols in debug info when not debugging); this was sometimes preventing function listers (e.g. used in Go To Name) from working when not debugging.
• Fixed the debugger's snap-to-code-location rule when a Disassembly tab is occupying the same panel as source code tabs. Previously, the debugger would overly aggressively switch back to source code tabs. Now, it should respect the preference of disassembly correctly.
• Fixed some crashes in the PDB -> RDI converter. (#792, #803)
• Fixed a bug which was sometimes causing a step-over operation to resume the process without catching the target thread after its step completed. (#804)

Linker Changes

• /OPT:REF Fixed a race in the dead-code-elimination pass where the linker sometimes erroneously removed live sections.
• Fixed a bug where the linker emitted relocations for empty COFF resource entries, which lead to "relocating against symbol that is in a removed section" errors.
• Added the /RAD_TYPE_SERVER switch to run the type-dedup pass on object files, producing RRT files that can be passed back on the next link to improve linking speed.

Binary Utility Changes

The binary utility is mostly unchanged, other than to support any related functionality changes listed above.