While it's certainly much harder in managed runtimes, I've been quite happy with gdb's "where" output on JNI-bound or syscall-stuck JVM cores, and jstack (and m

While it's certainly much harder in managed runtimes, I've been quite happy with gdb's "where" output on JNI-bound or syscall-stuck JVM cores, and jstack (and more modern friends) where that didn't work. For my other HLL of choice, pyrasite[1] works quite well. When using all of those tools, I encountered significant out-of-the-box usability issues until I learned what those debugger-esque tools were doing with regards to their "target" programs' (or their postmortem heaps) stacks, signal handlers, and allocators. Combining the understanding of the latter concepts with the former tools is a killer combo, and, while I can't speak directly to your counterexample of the NodeJS runtime, I would be extremely surprised if tooling did not exist to perform similar debugging tasks with it. 1. https://github.com/lmacken/pyrasite https://github.com/lmacken/pyrasite