DWARF support

[Richard Eisenberg]

Hi devs,

I was intrigued by Bodigrim's comment about HasCallStack in base (https://github.com/haskell/core-libraries-committee/issues/5#issuecomment-970942580) that there are other alternatives, such as DWARF. Over the years, I had tuned out every time I saw the word DWARF: it was (and is!) an unknown acronym and seems like a low-level detail. But Bodigrim's comment made me want to re-think this stance.

I found Ben's series of blog posts on DWARF, starting with https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20200403-dwarf-1.html. These are very helpful! In particular, they taught me that DWARF = platform-native debugging metadata. Is that translation accurate? If so, perhaps we should use both names: if I see that GHC x.y.z has DWARF support, I quickly scroll to the next bullet. If I see that GHC x.y.z has support for platform-native debugging metadata and is now compatible with e.g. gdb, I'm interested.

Going further, I have a key question for my use case: is this support available on Mac? The first post in the series describes support for "Linux and several BSDs" and the last post says that "Windows PDB support" is future work. (Is "PDB" platform-native debugging metadata for Windows? I don't know.) But I don't see any mention of Mac. What's the status here?

It would be very cool if this conversation ends with me making a video on how a few simple GHC flags can allow us to, say, get a stack trace on a pattern-match failure in a Haskell program.

Thanks!
Richard