This is a utility I would love to see inside the ghc source tree for
examining the AST
https://github.com/edsko/ghc-dump-tree
Alan
On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 11:18 PM, Ömer Sinan Ağacan
Currently the only way to debug and inspect GHC internals is by adding some carefully placed print statements. (I'd love to be proven wrong on this, cost of debugging this way is huge, given how long it's taking to rebuild GHC)
We have Outputable instances for most data types, and `Outputable.pprTrace` etc. helps with debugging/inspecting pure functions this way.
However, Outputable instances are hiding some details and they're sometimes not useful for debugging and inspecting internals. This is why I implemented CoreDump package(http://hackage.haskell.org/package/CoreDump), Outputable instance of CoreSyn is simply not useful for some things. Similarly, just today I had to add a show function for `HscTypes.TargetId` because `Outputable` instance was hiding `Maybe Phase` field.
Since the only way to debug or inspect GHC internals(except maybe the RTS) is by printing things, I think we should provide Show instances for.. basically everything. Otherwise I just can't see a way of debugging things and inspecting internals, tracing code etc. for learning purposes.
I was wondering what would be the cost of adding Show instances. Would that mean significantly increased compile times? Or significantly bigger GHC binaries? If that's the case, could we enable Show instances with some arguments so that we can enable/disable it by modifying mk/build.mk? _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs