PDB-DEBUG
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Microsoft PDB Preview.
At a glance
| Purpose | A Microsoft program database (PDB): debug symbols in a multi-stream file, matched to an executable by GUID and age. |
| Extensions | .pdb-debug |
| Poka parser | poka-pdb-debug |
| Viewer | poka-tree-viewer |
| Depth tier | Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers) |
| Breadth tier | B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers) |
How much Poka reads
B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.
Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-pdb-debug/src/main.rs (411 lines) and plugin.json. No unit tests or tests/samples.rs; the corpus has no .pdb-debug sample. Covers .pdb-debug. The tree reads the MSF 7.0 header, the stream directory and the PDB information stream: version, block size and count, stream count and sizes, GUID, age and signature. Judgement: B4: the container and the build identity are decoded, but no symbol or type is.
What Poka does not read
- Symbols, types, modules and source files are not decoded
- Only the stream table is listed (first 50 streams)
- MSF 2.0 (legacy) PDBs show the magic and size only
Libraries
Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.
- pdb (willglynn) (candidate; Apache-2.0 OR MIT; Rust; https://docs.rs/crate/pdb/latest) — Parser for PDB debugging information with no Windows or DIA SDK dependency; covers typical modern programs, not every corner. v0.8.0 (June 2022).
- pdb2 (candidate; Apache-2.0 OR MIT; Rust; https://docs.rs/crate/pdb2/latest) — Maintained fork of the pdb crate, v0.10.2; docs.rs page gave both afranchuk/pdb and afranchuk/pdb2 as repository.
Sources
- parsers/poka-pdb-debug/src/main.rs
- parsers/poka-pdb-debug/plugin.json