What this domain was before

ZeroBUGS, a C++ debugger for Linux

The earliest capture is 5 July 2006, under the title "Zero: A Linux Debugger for C++ Apps." The pitch was blunt about what it was competing with. Linux had plenty of front ends for GDB, the archived home page argued, but very few actual debugger engines, and GDB's several hundred thousand lines of code made it an open box in theory and a closed one in practice.

The site ran a feature comparison table against GDB. Graphical interface, runtime modularity, and a C++ API and SDK were the three rows where Zero claimed a yes and GDB a no. By version 2.0 it had become a commercial product: a 15 day trial, then 39.95 USD for a single user license, good for a year, with builds for Ubuntu 7.10 through 9.04 and SUSE 10.3 and 11.1. A 2012 thread on the digitalmars-d mailing list records that it was later made free.

What it actually did

• Command line and graphical interface
• Expression evaluation and conditional breakpoints
• Memory watchpoints
• Works with GCC 2.95 through 4.3, and the Intel compiler
• pthread applications, with debug events disabled per thread
• Debugging of forked processes
• Scriptable in Python, including custom data structure visualization
• Wide strings and Qt strings

Taken verbatim from the archived 2.0 feature list. It leaned on libdwarf, the Udis86 disassembler, Hans Boehm's libatomic-ops, gtkmm and gtksourceviewmm, and Google's hash_map, with a demangler for the D language contributed by Thomas Kuehne.

Who built it

ZeroBUGS was written by Cristian Vlasceanu. His own author page, archived in 2006, described him as a lifelong friend of Andrei Alexandrescu who suggested the name Loki for the C++ library in Modern C++ Design, a veteran of Amazon.com and RealNetworks who wrote for the C/C++ Users Journal, and someone who worked on interpreters and language translators by day and hacked Zero at night. His favorite editor was vim.

He has nothing to do with this blog. We've never spoken to him, he didn't sell us the domain, and nothing published here should be read as connected to him or endorsed by him. His name is on this page because he wrote the software people were linking to, and dropping that detail to make our own history look tidier would be a small act of theft.

Who still links here, and why

These are the surviving inbound links from the debugger years. We opened each one by hand on 7 September 2026 rather than trusting a backlink tool's summary, and the quoted anchor text is what the page actually says.

Notice what they have in common. Every one is a software project, a mailing list, or a developer Q and A thread, and every one is describing a debugging tool. That's a closer match to what this blog writes about than anything we could have earned in a first year of outreach, which is the honest reason this page exists at all.

The part that isn't flattering

The debugger site went quiet around 2013. What followed was not a graceful retirement. By 2016 the domain was serving generated PHP category pages with cloaking parameters in the URLs, and from roughly 2019 it carried an unrelated Chinese content farm. A 2023 capture is the hosting provider's account suspended page. After that it sat parked at a registrar until we bought it.

We checked Search Console before publishing anything: no manual action. That's a relief and not a guarantee, and it's the reason this page is explicit about the gap rather than presenting an unbroken line from 2006 to now. There isn't one. A domain with a spam chapter that pretends otherwise is exactly the kind of thing this blog would criticize if somebody else did it.

Separately, the domain is still being hit by an SEO link farm that has nothing to do with either era. If you find zero-bugs.com listed on a page selling PBN placements, that isn't us, we didn't buy it, and we'd rather it stopped.

Where the old URLs go now

The debugger's pages are gone and we're not going to reconstruct someone else's product site. What we did instead is send the old paths here, so a 2009 link from a mailing list archive lands on an explanation instead of an error page. That covers the 2.0 product pages, the help manual, and the articles directory.

The software itself is not ours to redistribute, so we don't host it. The Internet Archive kept the record, and these are the captures worth reading:

• Home page, July 2006
• Products intro, 2.0
• Feature list, 2.0
• Download and pricing, 2.0
• Third party credits, 2.0
• Manual index, 2006
• Managing Dynamic Libraries (PDF)