stack tracing {was assert(condition[, message]) patch}

[Brad Roberts]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, James Dunne wrote:

> I'm sorry but I really have to insert my skepticism here about stack traces.
> 
> Upon first glance it sounds like a wonderful idea, until you get to where Java
> is at.  Literally hundreds of lines of stack traces dumped into log files to
> wade thru, most of them completely useless because: THEY DON'T CONTAIN
> STATE!!!
> 
> Sure they have the call-stack state so you can see where the function calls
> came from but there are no local variables, no function parameter values, no
> class/struct dumps; basically nothing useful for anything more complex than
> the simplest case of a deterministic function call, and even then it's not too
> terribly useful.
> 
> While I agree that it is better than nothing, we can still do better. An
> entire run-time debugging framework is what we really want to shoot for.
> Exception logging, tracing, dumping of object contents, reading local
> variables, reading function parameters, etc.  This probably requires the help
> of a compile-time reflection system (where certain properties of objects are
> translated by the compiler into literal expressions).  Run-time reflection
> isn't really necessary.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> James Dunne

At that point, you really just want the core file.  Given the program 
image and the core, you can do all of the above.