Debugging Crashes

Crashes

When an app crashes, macOS creates a .ips file in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports. You can view these using the built in Console app (cmd-space Console) under "Crash Reports".

If you have enabled Zed's telemetry these will be uploaded to us when you restart the app. They end up in Datadog, and a Slack channel (internal only).

These crash reports are generated by the crashing binary, and contain a wealth of information; but they are hard to read for a few reasons:

• They don't contain source files and line numbers
• The symbols are mangled
• Inlined functions are elided

To get a better sense of the backtrace of a crash you can download the .ips file locally and run:

./script/symbolicate ~/path/zed-XXX-XXX.ips

This will download the correct debug symbols from our public digital ocean bucket, and run symbolicate for you.

The output contains the source file and line number, and the demangled symbol information for every inlined frame.

Panics

When the app panics at the rust level, Zed creates a file in ~/Library/Logs/Zed with the text of the panic, and a summary of the backtrace. On boot, if you have telemetry enabled, we upload these panics so we can keep track of them.

A panic is also considered a crash, and so for most panics we get both the crash report and the panic.