debugging-macos

What problem does it solve?

This skill eliminates the guesswork and time wasted diagnosing elusive crashes, main thread hangs, memory leaks, and sandbox violations in macOS apps, which require specialized platform-specific tools and knowledge to resolve efficiently.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Full Native Debugging Toolkit: Covers LLDB for AppKit/Swift breakpoint debugging, Memory Graph Debugger for retain cycle detection, Instruments templates for hangs/GPU/memory profiling, os_log/os_signpost for structured logging and performance tracing, dtrace for kernel-level system tracing, crash report symbolication, sandbox violation diagnostics, and sanitizers (ASan, TSan, UBSan, Main Thread Checker) for undefined behavior detection.
• Real-World Use Case: If your macOS app experiences a main thread hang during window resizing, use this skill to profile with the Instruments Hangs template, correlate with os_signpost intervals, and identify the blocking synchronous dispatch call causing the stall.
• Real-World Use Case: If your app crashes with a hex-only stack trace, use this skill to symbolicate the crash report with atos using the matching dSYM UUID to pinpoint the exact failing line of code.

Quick Start

Use the debugging-macos skill to diagnose the random EXC_BAD_ACCESS crash occurring when dismissing modal windows in your macOS app, starting with symbolication of the latest crash report.