I'm currently writing a native extension for NodeJS. This is basically a dll that NodeJS will load when you ask for it.
I have VS2012 attached to the Node process. I want to debug into Node's code that does the loading.
I have the .cc and .h files for node, but there are no .pdb files that I can find. How can I set a breakpoint in the Node source?
UPDATE: I DO have a node.lib file. Can that be a replacement for a pdb?
UPDATE 2: Tangential, but for anyone specifically debugging NodeJS, Node actually DOES ship a pdb, available at http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.8.22/node.pdb (replace the version number with whatever version you're looking for).
Without a way to relate actual source code to assembly code, you cannot debug from source code. You need a pdb file.
Think of it that way: any compiler could have generated the code, and even if VS2012 compiler generated the code, there is no way VS could reverse engineer all the code generation phase to know to which source line a specific assembly command belongs. And with inlining and such, it even adds more difficulty to the task.
So any debugger cannot debug without debug symbols, it is just impossible to reverse assembly semantics into a higher level language semantics (you lose structural information during the compilation process). Otherwise, static analysis tools would be so easy to write.
Edit: .lib file does not include debug information either, just the necessary information to link against it. So you're out of luck too.