How to native debug Java on macOS?

[Alexander Miloslavskiy]

Hello,

For a while now, I've been working on solving native JVM crashes in a 
third party library with lots on JNI. Some turn out to be library bugs, 
some are JVM bugs, some are OS bugs. Anyways, that involves a lot of 
work with a native debugger, such as WinDBG / GDB / LLDB.

Native-debugging JVM is harder then usual, because JVM raises lots of 
exceptions for internal purposes, and I have to skip them in my 
debugger. Eventually, I devised scripts for WinDBG (Windows) and GDB 
(Linux) to auto-skip those exceptions.

However, on macOS, it seems that LLDB debugger is unable to pass 
EXC_BAD_ACCESS down to application and instead get stuck on it. I spent 
a while and managed to get GDB running on macOS, but ran into other 
difficulties where GDB is unable to load debugging information for 
system libraries. I also think that in general, GDB is not very 
feature-reach in terms of macOS specific stuff.

I also tried to disable those internal exceptions in JVM, but it seems 
that it can't be done any easily.

So... How do you guys native-debug on macOS?