The cost of stack traces

Thu May 11 15:48:00 GMT 2006

David Daney writes:
 > Andrew Haley wrote:
 > > David Daney writes:
 > > > Andrew Haley wrote:
 > > > > One thing that seems almost to have got completely lost in all this
 > > > > talk about how to make stack traces faster is the sheer pointlessness
 > > > > of it all. Many (if not most) of the installed gcj-compiled libraries
 > > > > don't have debuginfo and usually no-one cares about the line numbers
 > > > > anyway.
 > > > 
 > > > I take exception with that last part :->
 > > 
 > > I stand by it. Usually, gcj-compiled programs are *used*.
 > 
 > I know that. That is why my priorities are sometimes different than 
 > yours. My users are all software engineers that like stack traces that 
 > reveal as much information as possible.
I repeat, I'm only proposing to change the default. If you want
verbose stack traces, you can turn them on, either at build time or by
setting an environment variable.
 > As defined in this e-mail thread, I now realize that do don't care about 
 > 'line-numbers'. Thanks for helping me arrive at this conclusion.
I'll take that as a "don't". :-)
 > What would you think about a patch that optionally fills in the fileName 
 > property of StackTraceElement with a string representation of the IP 
 > and information obtained from dladdr related to that address?
Semms reasonable, as long as it doesn't do so by default. Now that
really would confuse people!
By the way, I don't think the new stacktrace infrastructure makes
hex-only stacktraces difficult to generate. See line 275 in
stacktrace.cc.
Andrew.