haskell - lack of debugging and stack tracing

Haskell is a wonderful language. It provides a great level of abstraction and a fruitful ground for programming languages research.

But it lacks some certain things that other environments naturally have, like advanced debugging tools or to the least stack traces. Since the evaluation of a haskell program is a bit strange, conventional techniques are not generally applicable.

I've seen this video however, and if they do manage to integrate the tool into GHC with a reasonable degree of robustness and reliability, I think Haskell will have a great stack tracing toolkit. Moreover, since it is a playground for CS geeks, the proposed system will provide another fruitful ground to hack around.

I quite liked the approach.



Finding the needle: Stack Traces for GHC
Tristan Allwood, Simon Peyton-Jones and Susan Eisenbach
Haskell Symposium
Edinburgh 2009
ACM SIGPLAN