Making use of backtrace?

Incoming wall of text.

I want to be able to make use of the backtrace function in order to ease debugging when my application crashes for a user. I found an implementation which seems to work on MinGW, so on the target platforms I can pretty much use SEH or signals to catch a crash, get a backtrace and do something with it (I also realize that sometimes, I won't be able to do anything good in the handler due to the state of the application. I'm willing to take that risk.)

The problem is, I don't know where to begin. I of course need the debugging information to be on a server of sorts, but I'm not even sure what I should do to get this information. How do I generate it? I know gdb can determine what line of code an address is, and I'm guessing gdb is using embedded debug info - but I can't find any reasonable sources of information for the format or how I could do this without the information embedded (although I have a feeling i could just extract and strip, it sounds redundant to me.) I'm also not sure how, using signals, I would get the backtrace, since I'm pretty sure signal handlers get a different thread. (But hell if I know. I've never actually done one.)

I saw Google Breakpad, but this is an awful solution. I checked everything out from source and it seems it doesn't really work on Windows without hacking around, and definitely not with MinGW. It might be useful for reference, but i don't think it is actually helpful in my case. Too many dependencies, not enough docs, no MinGW support... not worth it.

Any advice? I'm new here, but I'm hoping unlike /g/ people here actually know their stuff. I'm primarily concerned with MinGW right now, since I bet this will be much simpler under Linux and etc.

>>35
it's harder than in C
Not really. Tackling specific problems is probably easier in other languages than in C. The problem is that most people know C, so if you have to work with a lot of other people, you're going to be somewhat restricted. If you look at the GOAL language Naughty Dog used, for example, you can see that the benefits were enormous but the drawbacks were basically: not enough people know lisp well. That is a very large drawback because of all that it implies (lack of tools, lack of programmers, etc). But then we're not talking about the difficulty of the task, or what the best language is for the task; instead we're talking about human resource issues.

It is really terrible that one is short-circuited in exposition to mean the other.