Re: [ANN] StackTracePlus 0.1.0

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On 2013-09-27 2:40 PM, "Hisham" <h@hisham.hm> wrote:
>
> 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
>

I've often wished for a way to disable tail calls, perhaps through the debug library, in order to get better stack traces. Do you have a patch for your modified version?