Bring Hat tracing back to life

[malcolm.wallace@…]

The  Hat tracer for Haskell is a very powerful tool for debugging and comprehending programs. Sadly, it suffers from bit-rot. It was written largely before the Cabal library packaging system was developed. It is difficult to get any non-trivial program to work with Hat, if the program uses any pre-packaged libraries outside the haskell'98 standard.

The aims of this project would be

(a) to fix Hat so that it adequately traces hierarchical library packages

(b) to integrate support for tracing into Cabal, so a user can simply ask for the 'tracing' version of a package in addition to the 'normal' and 'profiling' versions.

(c) to develop a "wrapping" scheme whereby the code inside libraries does not in fact need to be traced at all, but instead Hat would treat the library functions as abstract entities.

Interested Mentors

• Malcolm Wallace (@ cs.york.ac.uk)

Interested Students

[duncan]

Or how about a project to look at whether hat could be ported to the ghci debugging and tracing infrastructure?

[dons]

Could this be integrated with the GHCi debugger, or hpc tracing framework?