Algorithmic debugging of real-world haskell programs: deriving dependencies from the cost centre stack

Abstract

Existing algorithmic debuggers for Haskell require a transformation of all modules in a program, even libraries that the user does not want to debug and which may use language features not supported by the debugger. This is a pity, because a promising approach to debugging is therefore not applicable to many real-world programs. We use the cost centre stack from the Glasgow Haskell Compiler profiling environment together with runtime value observations as provided by the Haskell Object Observation Debugger (HOOD) to collect enough information for algorithmic debugging. Program annotations are in suspected modules only. With this technique algorithmic debugging is applicable to a much larger set of Haskell programs. This demonstrates that for functional languages in general a simple stack trace extension is useful to support tasks such as profiling and debugging.

Extending programs with debug-related features, with application to hardware development

“…Sansom and Peyton Jones (1997) describe the profiling of functional programs by using "cost centres", a paradigm to identify locations in a program at an expression-level (rather than functional-level) granularity. Others have continued that to make it more practical (Faddegon and Chitil 2015). All the techniques described above rely on program transformation.…”