Debugging Blink

Child process auto-attach on Windows

To debug Blink and other child processes, a debugger should support child process auto-attach.

There are some extensions to make this happen on Windows:

• Visual Studio 2022 https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsdbgplat.MicrosoftChildProcessDebuggingPowerTool2022
• Visual Studio Code https://github.com/albertziegenhagel/childdebugger-vscode

Disable pointer compression

V8 and Blink uses pointer compression by default. This lowers RAM usage dramatically, but prevents debuggers to display most variables properly.

To disable pointers compression add this to out/<Config>/gn.args:

v8_enable_pointer_compression = false
cppgc_enable_pointer_compression = false
cppgc_enable_caged_heap = false