Is there a portable equivalent to DebugBreak()/__debugbreak?

I just added a module to portable-snippets (a collection of public domain snippets of portable code) to do this. It's not 100% portable, but it should be pretty robust:

  • __builtin_debugtrap for some versions of clang (identified with __has_builtin(__builtin_debugtrap))
  • On MSVC and Intel C/C++ Compiler: __debugbreak
  • For ARM C/C++ Compiler: __breakpoint(42)
  • For x86/x86_64, assembly: int3
  • For ARM Thumb, assembly: .inst 0xde01
  • For ARM AArch64, assembly: .inst 0xd4200000
  • For other ARM, assembly: .inst 0xe7f001f0
  • For Alpha, assembly: bpt
  • For non-hosted C with GCC (or something which masquerades as it), __builtin_trap
  • Otherwise, include signal.h and
    • If defined(SIGTRAP) (i.e., POSIX), raise(SIGTRAP)
    • Otherwise, raise(SIGABRT)

In the future the module in portable-snippets may expand to include other logic and I'll probably forget to update this answer, so you should look there for updates. It's public domain (CC0), so feel free to steal the code.


A method that is portable to most POSIX systems is:

raise(SIGTRAP);

What about defining a conditional macro based on #ifdef that expands to different constructs based on the current architecture or platform.

Something like:

#ifdef _MSC_VER
#define DEBUG_BREAK __debugbreak()
#else
...
#endif

This would be expanded by the preprocessor the correct debugger break instruction based on the platform where the code is compiled. This way you always use DEBUG_BREAK in your code.