Decorating exceptions with backtrace information

[Carter Schonwald]

ben, could you please email the libraries list with this too? This seems
like a core libraries / base change rather than a ghc-the-compiler change

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 6:57 PM Michael Sloan <mgsloan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks so much for making a proposal for this, Ben!!  It's great to see
> progress here.
>
> I'm also glad that there is now a proposal process.  I made a fairly
> similar proposal almost exactly 5 years ago to the libraries list -
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2015-April/025471.html - but
> without the subtlety of particular backtrace representations.  Skimming the
> ensuing thread may still be informative.
>
> In particular, there is one thing I would like to highlight from that old
> proposal.  I think it'd be good to have a standard way to represent a chain
> of exceptions, and build this into `catch` and `finally`.  Python and Java
> both have a mechanism for this, and both refer to it as a "cause"
> exception.  When an exception is thrown during exception handling, the
> exception being handled is preserved as its "cause".  I find this mechanism
> to be incredibly useful in Java, it has made the underlying issue much
> clearer in many cases, and in other cases at least provides helpful
> context.  I have no doubt such a mechanism would have saved me many hours
> of debugging exceptions in Haskell systems I've worked on in the past.
>
> I considered commenting about that directly on the proposal, but I figure
> this is a better place to suggest expanding the scope of the change :) .
> Totally understandable if you want to keep this proposal focused on
> stacktraces, but I think it'd be good to consider this as a potential
> future improvement.
>
> -Michael
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 3:55 PM Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> After a nice discussion on IRC about the unfortunate state of error
>> reporting in Haskell, I felt compelled to write down some long-lingering
>> thoughts regarding backtraces on exceptions. The result is GHC proposal
>> #330 [1]. I think the approach is viable and perhaps even
>> straightforward. I have the sketch of an implementation here [2].
>>
>> Please have a look at the proposal and leave your comments. If there is
>> consensus it is possible that we could have this done for 8.12.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> - Ben
>>
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/330
>> [2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/3236
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