On 30/03/2010 20:57, Mihai Maruseac wrote:

I'd like to introduce my idea for the Haskell GSOC of this year. In
fact, you already know about it, since I've talked about it here on
the haskell-cafe, on my blog and on reddit (even on #haskell one day).

Basically, what I'm trying to do is a new debugger for Haskell, one
that would be very intuitive for beginners, a graphical one. I've
given some examples and more details on my blog [0], [1], also linked
on reditt and other places.

This is not the application, I'm posting this only to receive some
kind of feedback before writing it. I know that it seems to be a
little too ambitious but I do think that I can divide the work into
sessions and finish what I'll start this summer during the next year
and following.

[0]: http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/haskell-project-idea/
[1]: http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/visual-haskell-debugger-part-2/

Thanks for your attention,

My concerns would be:

 - it doesn't look like it would scale very well beyond small
  examples, the graphical representation would very quickly
  get unwieldy, unless you have some heavyweight UI stuff
  to make it navigable.

 - it's too ambitious

 - have you looked around to see what kind of debugging tools
  people are asking for?  The most oft-requested feature is
  stack traces, and there's lots of scope for doing something
  there (but also many corpses littering the battlefield,
  so watch out!)