Step out

Step out is stepping out of the current function execution.

Interface

class debugger
{
public:
    void step_out();
}

Interface explained

Again, deceptively simple interface. That's how debugger make a user's life easy, isn't it?

Implementation

We want to run after return, therefore we will naturally set a breakpoint at the return sites. When we hit the breakpoint, we step one more instruction further, if the stack pointer is larger than the time when we expect to step out, we are now outside of the frame, just step again until we reach another statement.

Practice notes

We are lucky because our code generator generates a single exit point, sometimes we do not. In that case we need to guard all the exit points.