I built a post-mortem debugger for native Windows x64/x86 crashes
Details
- External ID
- 49821086
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a post-mortem debugger for native Windows x64/x86 crashes
- Website domain
- forensicdbg.com
- Launched
- Sept. 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 37
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.817384370015949
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 27, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 27, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Description
Hello HN!I've spent years debugging Windows crashes with tools that were either friendly but limited (e.g. Visual Studio) or powerful but archaic (e.g. WinDbg). I developed patterns and methods for understanding what was going on, and decided to build it into a much more effective debugging tool called ForensicDbg.I built a modern interface to minimize the friction when debugging. All of the data shown to you is analyzed, interpreted, and presented to you clearly, so you can focus on what matters. Everything is interlinked so you can quickly and intuitivly navigate through the process space.ForensicDbg comes with an MCP server which allows for agenic debugging. The work done to interpret and interlink your data also benefits AI tools. It removes the risk of hallucinations while building a stable foundation for them to work from without spending tokens.If you want to try it out you can sign up and get a free beta license here: https://www.forensicdbg.com/beta
Enrichment
- Theme
- system maintenance and file utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- post-mortem crash debugger for windows
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No A native post-mortem crash debugger requires low-level systems programming, deep knowledge of Windows internal memory layouts (x86/x64 PE formats, minidump structures, PDB symbol parsing, and DbgHelp APIs).
What it would actually take: This software relies on native C/C++ or Rust directly interfacing with Windows debugging APIs (DbgHelp.dll, DIA SDK) to parse minidumps (.dmp), reconstruct call stacks with unwind info (x64 structured exception handling), dissect thread registers, resolve symbols from symbol servers, and detect heap corruptions. This level of low-level systems architecture and internal Windows ABI expertise cannot be achieved through vibe coding.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: WinDbg, CANASTA, x64dbg
Concerns raised: Landing page video cannot be fullscreened or interacted with, Video is hard to see and lacks clarity/narration
Feature requests: Narrated walkthrough video comparing features to WinDbg, Interactable UI demo or standard fullscreenable video embed
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 72 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #13 of 73 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 323 days after the earliest competitor.
- Fatal Core Dump · hn · 2026-03-14 · 68 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- antidbg · github · 2026-09-27 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Dbg · hn · 2026-04-13 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Seapie · hn · 2026-01-12 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Deadlog · hn · 2026-02-10 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- FixBugs · hn · 2026-07-13 · 43 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- MCPShark Viewer (VS Code/Cursor extension)- view MCP traffic in-editor · hn · 2025-12-17 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Wirebrowser · hn · 2025-12-10 · 73 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.