How to Write a Crash Reporter

5 ibobev 2 9/7/2025, 1:23:10 AM gamesbymason.com ↗

Comments (2)

csb6 · 1d ago
Has anyone had experience using Crashpad or Breakpad? When I looked into them there seemed to be a lot of boilerplate needed and I wasn’t sure which one to use.

Are there other cross-platform (i.e. macOS, Linux, Windows) crash reporting libraries? It seems like it should be common enough to warrant a reusable library.

masonremaley · 18h ago
After publishing this I wrote another crash reporter for a freelance client, but it was much more involved because that project doesn’t ship debug symbols to users so we had to do symbol resolution server side, which precludes using the closed source platform specific tools for this on macOS, iOS, and Windows. On Linux it’s easy of course.

I’m going to do a followup post at some point with what I learned from that project because it was much bigger. The TLDR is that IMO there’s a gap here I’d love to see an open source project fill. I don’t have time to start it right now, and my recommendation if you don’t want to get too in the weeds is to ship symbols with your executable and bypass a lot of the work.

(Edit: This didn’t answer your direct question sorry. I looked at both Crashpad and Breakpad when I started the second crash reporter and decided against both, but I don’t quite remember why.)