Re: Dubiousness of the debug library

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 4:03 PM, Brigham Toskin <brighamtoskin@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Brigham Toskin <brighamtoskin@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Jul 8, 2015, at 10:40 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> So why are we still squeamish about it?
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I confess I generally avoid it, and raise an eyebrow when people here
>> >> recommend it’s use in production code. If some of the functions in the
>> >> library are needed for day-to-day Lua functionality, then to my mind
>> >> they
>> >> don’t really belong in the debug library.
>> >
>> >
>> > This is mostly not really a debug library anymore, it seems like. A
>> > better
>> > name is probably the "deep introspection" library. But they can't really
>> > change the name because that will break extant code.
>>
>> It's still impolite to use it in library code, and that's where it's
>> often most useful.
>
>
> I can see why it would be a turn off it loading a library fundamentally
> changed the semantics of the language while you weren't looking. Unless of
> course that was the whole point of the library, in which case,  caveat
> programptor. But if you were careful that the effects of using debug were
> (1) justified, (2) localized, (3) didn't cause undo resource drain on the
> system as a whole, I would have no qualms about going for it.
>
> --
> Brigham Toskin

True enough, but the whole thing about the debug library is that (2)
is difficult to do when it comes to the really interesting stuff.

/s/ Adam