Richard Eisenberg writes:

Hi devs,

I almost exclusively work with a DEBUG compiler. It continually shocks me that I'm relatively alone in this stance, as the ASSERTs littered throughout GHC have caught many a bug in easier a manner than long stares at -ddump-tc-trace would do. In any case, my goal in this email is not to convince you to follow suit. My goal is to request that our CI infrastructure include at least one testsuite run in a DEBUG compiler. A patch I'm working on is failing a test because of an assertion failure. I doubt my patch is the culprit, but I also can't categorically rule it out. So, I'm left rebuilding HEAD with DEBUG turned on to see if I can repro the ASSERTion failure. Clearly, having a CI trace of this would simplify things -- not to mention catch bugs earlier.

I completely agree; we do need to test DEBUG. I have an open merge request (!58) which adds support for this but it currently fails (!) and I haven't had time to look at sorting it out. I'll try to have a look today. Cheers, - Ben