Crashdump_viewer_cli - new CLI for Parsing Crash Dumps

Platform Independence: No wxWidgets dependency, enabling use over SSH or in environments without graphical interfaces.
Process Ancestor Grouping: Presents a “Processes Group” view, organizing processes by their named ancestor (the closest parent process in the hierarchy that has a user-defined name). This simplifies understanding complex process hierarchies. See CDParser::create_descendants_table function.
Memory Address Decoding: Decodes stack, heap, and message queue addresses, providing detailed insights into process memory.
Memory Efficiency: Unlike the official crash dump viewer, this CLI tool does not attempt to load the entire crash dump into memory, enabling analysis of very large dumps.

peixian · April 26, 2025, 7:17pm

tldlr: We just released a wxwidgets-free crash dump parser:

This CLI tool allows you to view Erlang crash dumps without requiring wxWidgets. While it shares the purpose of the official crash dump viewer, it offers several key advantages:

Platform Independence: No wxWidgets dependency, enabling use over SSH or in environments without graphical interfaces.

Process Ancestor Grouping: Presents a “Processes Group” view, organizing processes by their named ancestor (the closest parent process in the hierarchy that has a user-defined name). This simplifies understanding complex process hierarchies. See CDParser::create_descendants_table function.

Memory Address Decoding: Decodes stack, heap, and message queue addresses, providing detailed insights into process memory.

Memory Efficiency: Unlike the official crash dump viewer, this CLI tool does not attempt to load the entire crash dump into memory, enabling analysis of very large dumps.

Note: This is a beta release, and some features are still under development. We encourage you to try it and provide feedback. See the TODO list below for planned enhancements.

Single binary, compiled (Release General Beta Release · WhatsApp/crashdump_viewer_cli · GitHub).
Also available as a Crate if you’re interested in integrating it (crates.io: Rust Package Registry).
Apache 2 licensed, so hopefully less corporate licensing annoyances.

My coworker @miriampena brought this up at her last Code BEAM talk, but this is now generally available. If you’ve got a bunch of crash dump from servers and hate scp’ing it down to your local machine, give this tool a shot! I’d love some feedback on it.