Re: How to get a heap visualization

Ben Gamari wrote:

Yitzchak Gale writes:

...

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 should point out that there is a differential (D3055) by erikd from earlier this year which folded ghc-heap-view into GHC. The goal was to make heap-view a supported library which could be relied upon by third party tools. As far as I can remember most of the hard work is done; it just needed some finishing touches. Perhaps you would be interested in picking it up?

Sorry if I gave the wrong impression, but IMO ghc-heap-view is a *long* way from being ready to integrate into GHC. ghc-heap-view currently supports most of the normal/simple heap object types. but has no support for more complex objects. Furthermore, levity polymorphism adds a whole new dimension to the problem. My estimate of the amount of work required to make ghc-heap-view cover all the heap objects was such that I abandoned the project. I would love to see someone pick it up and run with it. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/