This is a cool library used in Firefox, Chrome, and Google Earth. It allows you to build an executable with no debugging symbols, the library will generate crash minidumps. The debugging symbols are saved during compilation of the executable though. Later when a crash occurs a separate program can take the minidump and the debug symbols and put them back together again to create a human readable stacktrace. So basically you can build an executable without debug information and still debug it.
https://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/wiki/GettingStartedWithBreakpadI think this would be something really useful to take advantage of in ENIGMA. It would allow our end users to make extremely efficient games but still debug them just as in every GM 8.1 or earlier GameMaker version. It would also give us extremely useful information when users report an ENIGMA crash to us on GitHub as we can cache and store the debug symbols for every release we've made or have them include it with the crash report.
Using it with end user games would be a little trickier though because it means when you release your game you have to hold on to a copy of your debug symbols and properly version your game. However I think I have already thought of a way around this. Since we already make use of zlib to archive the resources, we could also archive the debug symbols file right into the executable. While this would still increase the file size of executables to include the debug symbols the game would not run like shit because the symbols would be separated from the program code.
This would mean that anywhere a game is used it would run just as you would expect but you could also take any crash/minidump log it spits out and feed the executable and the dump file to a debugger to get a human readable stacktrace. We could also achieve GM8.1 and LGM style exception dialogs by just embedding it into every exe or make it an option if the users really care to squeeze out the few extra bytes in file size. Either way I think this could seriously improve the situation regarding debugging in both ENIGMA and its engine and end user games. I'd like to know what everyone thinks.
