"Boespflug, Mathieu"
Hi Ben,
it sounds like some of the remaining limitations around DWARF support (e.g. finishing the stack sampling work, local bindings in GDB, ...) could make for a good Haskell Summer of Code project. Have you considered writing this up as one or two project ideas here: https://summer.haskell.org/ideas.html? As HSoC sponsors, we'd be more than happy to see someone pick this up.
I haven't until now. To be honest I think the local-bindings-in-GDB issue is a hard problem and is likely well beyond a summer project. You would need not just the ability track the in-scope bindings in every context of the source program, but also the ability to reconstitute their values after simplification. It's also not clear to me how useful this feature would be given how much simplified code often differs from the code the user writes. However, I do see there might be room for a project on the statistical profiler itself or its associated tooling. We just need to come to a conclusion on which direction is most appropriate for GHC. For this having some concrete use-cases would be quite helpful. How do you envision using statistical profiling on Haskell projects? What is the minimal set of features that would make for a useful profiler? Cheers, - Ben