Thinking about this in more detail, I think this facility would be most useful if it also contained information about what module/file the code came from. I'm currently attempting to track down a bug in the code generator which I know is due to a miscompiled library, and it would make my life substantially easier if there was an easy way to narrow down possible crash sites. I suppose one method already available to me is to get a list of suspicious identifiers and then cross reference these against the generated object files. Edward Excerpts from Simon Marlow's message of Tue Mar 01 05:46:01 -0500 2011:
On 21/02/2011 01:08, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
Excerpts from Tyson Whitehead's message of Sun Feb 20 07:14:56 -0500 2011:
I believe a back trace on the actual call stack is generally considered not that useful in a lazy language as it corresponds to the evaluation sequence, That is, it is demand centric while written code is production centric
Yeah, such a buffer wouldn't be very useful for end-users; I'm thinking more in terms of going "backwards in time" for the STG execution.
Yes, that might be useful. However it would require compiling all the libraries with that option too - so it would be an internal debug option for use with a live GHC build, not something you could use with a pre-built GHC (well, you could use it, but you wouldn't get traces for library code).
Cheers, Simon