Re: The poor quality of Emacs's backtraces

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Mattias.

On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 20:06:02 +0200, Mattias Engdegård wrote:
> 14 juli 2023 kl. 15.07 skrev Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>:

> > There are only 1,728 occurrences of CHECK_* in the Emacs C sources.
> > Much of the amendment could be automated.

> No, we had better be careful here -- don't want to make anything slower.

Aren't we always careful?  I wasn't intending to make anything slower
(except, marginally, the handling of errors).

> > Yesterday evening, the identity of {comp-spill-lap-function} was
> > very helpful in locating the buggy source.

> That was yesterday. Today you wouldn't need it, because nth now
> appears in the backtrace (well, most of the time).

That's a rather strange notion.  Whether it's "needed" or not, it's
undeniably helpful.  I think you agreed yesterday with my basic tenet,
that Emacs backtraces are of poor quality.  This is one way that quality
can be raised.

> > Do you have any alternative mechanism in mind for identifying anonymous
> > functions in backtraces?

> I disagree with the idea of that somehow being a requirement.

Why?  Are you working on anything which could remotely be considered a
competitor for this facility; something you suggested yesterday might be
the case?

I have working code implementing the putting of this extra information
into backtraces.  Again, why do you regard this as a negative feature?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).