Skip to content

Show evaluation step-by-step in GHCi

The ability see every evaluation step for executing a particular code in ghci is needed.

Earlier that could have done in HAT, or ghc-vis. But as of today, HAT doesn't compile even with stack. And, at least personally for me, neither ghc-vis could be installed.

I want to point out that the funcionality is **very** important for the language. Without that (i.e. as it is now) it is impossible for newcomers to see how a particular construction going to be evaluated, how much memory it going to take. Nowadays newcomers have to deal with memory issues post-mortem: an app takes all system memory, dies, then one build everything for profiling, and start playing a Battleship with the allocation graph; which going to be a hard game, unless you're experienced enough to not even allow that to happen most of the times.

However, if there was a way to execute functions in GHCI, looking the evaluation step-by-step, days of hard debugging would turn into a few hours of executing a couple of functions in ghci.

Trac metadata
Trac field Value
Version 8.0.1
Type FeatureRequest
TypeOfFailure OtherFailure
Priority normal
Resolution Unresolved
Component GHCi
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system
Architecture
To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information