Re: [ANN] StackTracePlus 0.1.0

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 27 September 2013 10:04, Matthew Wild <mwild1@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 September 2013 11:55, Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2013/9/23 Ignacio Burgueño <iburgueno@gmail.com>:
>>> I'd like to announce StackTracePlus.
>>>
>>> https://github.com/ignacio/StackTracePlus
>>
>> Timing is interesting, I worked on something similar in the last few weeks.
>
> I also implemented something like this for Prosody. The primary
> purpose was for easier debugging, since stack traces are often the
> best we get to work with. Increasing their verbosity, and also their
> clarity, was important as I found the default stack traces too dense
> to read at a glance. Plus when switching between languages I found it
> impossible to remember whether I should be looking at the top or
> bottom of the listing (hi Python!).
>
> I also drew marker lines where the stack crossed between different
> modules, or between C and Lua.
>
> Since I added colour as well, the best explanation is a screenshot:
> https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/util_debug.png

As a fan of colorful terminal output... wow :)

Since we're on the topic of stack traces... tail calls always bug me
(no pun intended!) in stack traces. One very little thing I did that
improved my life a lot was to build a modified version of the Lua
interpreter which does not emit tail calls (it's a tiny change, just
search for OP_TAILCALL in the appropriate place in Lua 5.1 or 5.2, I
did it for both). When I'm reproducing a bug that has tail calls in
it, it's often faster to re-run my script with `./lua-5.2-no-tailcalls
script.lua` and see the whole stack trace than to try to figure out
the missing steps. Of course it can't be used all the time or else
tail-recursive functions will overflow, but as a side tool for
debugging, it's really handy. It's something that, after I came up
with it, it made me think "why didn't I do this years ago?".

-- Hisham