Joachim, first and foremost, thanks for the awesome libraries ghc-vis and ghc-heap-view. The design trade-offs for ghc-vis do make sense if you think of it as a didactic tool. But as a debugging tool, the most important factor is that it should "Just Work", with no big builds, no fiddling, no googling. When you reach for a debugging tool, you are *already* in a debugging situation; you don't have patience for also debugging the tool. I wrote:
Getting ghc-vis to compile looks hopeless, for a number of reasons..The dependencies on gtk and cairo are huge.
You wrote:
Is that really a problem?
Admittedly I haven't tried in quite a while. In the past, getting all the Haskell libraries and C libraries to match up and work together on any given platform at matching versions was a huge task. If nowadays you can just type "stack build" or "cabal install" (with new-build or in a sandbox) on even one platform and have it just work, reliably every time, month after month, that would be an amazing feat. But in my case, I need even more than that. I need it to "Just Work" on certain specific platforms, none of which have ever been known as the best for running GTK: Windows, and headless Ubuntu.
The heap scraper backend for ghc-vis, ghc-heap-view, looks usable, and better supported than vacuum. But is there a quick and simple visualizer for its output, without ghc-vis?
Well, the :printHeap command that comes with it does “visualize” things as something resembling Haskell syntax... I don’t know of anything more graphical besides ghc-vis, but you could roll your own, if you want to; you can use ghc-heap-view to get a graph using buildHeapGraph and then visualize that as you like.
Yes, this is the approach I will probably take. I'll start with just printing the output into a text file. Maybe I can massage that and find what I need. Thanks, Yitz