Hello Pepe, Monday, July 3, 2006, 2:15:59 PM, you wrote:
As you may know, this project was accepted for Google SoC and work started a few weeks ago. There are now some observable results that can be tested, and I have set up a wiki page at: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Ghci/Debugger
As we are now approaching the less clear parts of the project your impressions and ideas (either extense designs or small pointers) are very welcome. The designs for dynamic breakpoints and call traces are open issues yet.
i'm very pleased with this year's selection of SoC projects and debugging is among the things i'm highly demanded. I personally interested in debugging imperative C-like code, with abilities to set breakpoints, watch (and change?) variable values, see "call stack" (i think that closures stack should serve this need), see local variables at each "call stack" level, evaluate expression and perform IO actions it's especially important for me to be able to use debugger inside some IDE that will allow to set breakpoints and ask variables' values directly inside the source code I'd written. i can recall the following haskell IDEs: HIDE, EclipseFP, Haskell mode for Emacs, Visual Haskell, WinGhci. I think their authors will say better what kind of interface with debugger they prefer imho, just console I/O interface should be enough for most IDEs, as long as debugger's output can be non-ambiguously parsed. Gdb often used to debug C++ programs inside IDEs in this way, i think that cloning it's interface should make it easier to integrate GhcDebugger support into IDEs i also vote for simplest implementation of dynamic breakpoints - the tight integration with IDEs, i.e. _features_, is more important than efficiency (if i correctly understood that this may change only an efficiency) I also will appreciate ability to view call traces - it's the thing that i really need sometimes, especially when debugging unexpected exceptions like "head: empty list". It will be especially great to see all variables' values at each execution moment. I don't have a great ideas about representation of this trace. One obvious idea would be to save some binary file and write special viewer for it, another possible idea is to produce (gigantic) html with trace represented as tree with usual '+' marks to expand each node. ps: you will not get much answers - first, because it's a summer and most Haskellers prefer at this time to set up breakpoints on bodies of their girlfriends ;) second - because this maillist don't have many readers. i suggest you to dup your question into main Haskell list and i cc'ed my answer to haskell-cafe in advance. but nevertheless your project is really important to make Haskell more usable for everyday work and Haskellers returned from their vacations will be glad to see that their debugging tasks becomes much easier. please also write exhaustive documentation at the end of your work so that ghci debugger will not become "black hole" feature -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com