Saturday, November 10, 2007

Improvements in the Wasp Debugger..

As you can see from the screenshot, Wasp's trace mode now works only on the process that enters trace. This should make it much easier to trace coroutines and subprocesses, especially in the REPL. (Previously, you often got an eyeful of the REPL's compiler busily chopping up your expressions.) Any sub-processes spawned by a process in trace mode will also start out in trace mode. Keep in mind that the REPL runs each expression within the REPL's process, so typing (enable-trace) at the REPL prompt is ill-advised. (For those of you who couldn't resist, just type in (disable-trace) to turn it back off when your terminal catches up..) Also, the output has been cleaned up quite a bit -- only call frames and returned values are displayed. I think that Wasp's compiler has matured enough for end users to resent seeing every variable lookup, argument push and jump.