Release plans

[Simon Marlow]

On 20 July 2004 01:43, Bernie Pope wrote:

> Since you are working on the backend is there any chance that GHC
> could support symbol names in the heap?
> 
> I tried to add this previously and failed miserably.
> 
> I would be happy with a flag, such as '-debug-symbols' or somesuch,
> that keeps source symbol names, at least for data constructors, and
> possibly functions.
> 
> This would be a BIG win for buddha and possibly other debugging tools.
> 
> Currently I have to turn on -prof which is a bad hack.

This is a good suggestion, but it's unlikely that we'll have time to add
it before the release.  I'd like to see us support more debugging
information, preferably in a way that can be stripped from a binary.

I'm not sure that we want to have yet another "way" to build libraries.
Debugging is something that should be easy, otherwise the effort is too
much and we resort to using Debug.trace (I'm guilty of this - I confess
to never having tried any of the available debuggers simply because
they're not immediate enough).

> Will there be any big changes to the heap representation of objects
> with the new backend?

No change at all.

Cheers,
	Simon