[Haskell-cafe] Re: GSOC Haskell Project

[Simon Marlow]

On 30/03/2010 20:57, Mihai Maruseac wrote:

> I'd like to introduce my idea for the Haskell GSOC of this year. In
> fact, you already know about it, since I've talked about it here on
> the haskell-cafe, on my blog and on reddit (even on #haskell one day).
>
> Basically, what I'm trying to do is a new debugger for Haskell, one
> that would be very intuitive for beginners, a graphical one. I've
> given some examples and more details on my blog [0], [1], also linked
> on reditt and other places.
>
> This is not the application, I'm posting this only to receive some
> kind of feedback before writing it. I know that it seems to be a
> little too ambitious but I do think that I can divide the work into
> sessions and finish what I'll start this summer during the next year
> and following.
>
> [0]: http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/haskell-project-idea/
> [1]: http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/visual-haskell-debugger-part-2/
>
> Thanks for your attention,

My concerns would be:

  - it doesn't look like it would scale very well beyond small
    examples, the graphical representation would very quickly
    get unwieldy, unless you have some heavyweight UI stuff
    to make it navigable.

  - it's too ambitious

  - have you looked around to see what kind of debugging tools
    people are asking for?  The most oft-requested feature is
    stack traces, and there's lots of scope for doing something
    there (but also many corpses littering the battlefield,
    so watch out!)

Cheers,
	Simon