What not as assembler and it's debugger?

[Mark Wielaard]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 09:14:01AM +0530, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
> Since the elfutils project provides a Linux-only tuned edition of ELF binary
> management toolkit, why does it not also include an assembler and it's
> associated debugger?
> 
> I understand that the AT&T mnemonics are something of a standard under Unix
> and Unix-like operating systems, and that GNU binutils provides "as" for the
> same, but since elfutils provides replacements for almost all of the
> utilities from binutils why not an assembler too?

The simple answer is, not enough time.
There is a start of an assembler/disassembler in elfutils/libasm.
But the number of architectures it supports is currently very limited.

Likewise for a full debugger. There is some support for debugger like
functionality in the DWARF Frontend Library (libdwfl). But extending
that to a traditional debugger is a lot of work. Although people have
done something like that, see https://sourceware.org/systemtap and
https://drgn.readthedocs.io.

Cheers,

Mark