clj-backtrace: more readable backtraces for Clojure
Mark McGranaghan
I'm happy to announce an alpha release of clj-backtrace, a library for
processing backtraces generated by Clojure programs. The library works
by separating useful backtrace information from the noise generated by
the Clojure compilation process, and also provides functions for
pretty-printing these cleaned backtraces.
You can see simple usage instructions and example backtrace output on
the library's README page:
http://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-backtrace/tree/master/README.textile
If you've ever felt that backtraces in Clojure were difficult to read,
I hope you'll give this library a try and let me know if it helps!
- Mark
Michael Reid
I don't have Clojure in front of me right now to try this out, but
from the looks of the README let me be the first to give you an
emphatic *Thank you*.
This is looking rather useful. Nice work.
My one concern with this is how brittle is this with respect to
Clojure's development? Have you had any trouble getting reasonable
output on various revisions of Clojure?
/mike.
Mark McGranaghan
Thanks for your interest. clj-backtrace is developed and tested
against Clojure head, though it should work with reasonably recent
versions of Clojure. I hope that you and other Clojure users have a
chance to try it out in your environments and report the results back
to the group.
I wouldn't normally rely on the exposed implementation details like
clj-backtrace does, but these details are exactly the problem that the
library is trying to fix, so AFAIK there is no way around it. A patch
proving otherwise would of course be welcome.
Looking forward to your reports,
- Mark
Konrad Hinsen
> I'm happy to announce an alpha release of clj-backtrace, a library for
> processing backtraces generated by Clojure programs. The library works
> by separating useful backtrace information from the noise generated by
> the Clojure compilation process, and also provides functions for
> pretty-printing these cleaned backtraces.
Thanks a lot, this is *very* useful.
I just wonder how it works. All I did is add the library to the
classpath and (use) it. That seems to be sufficient to change the
behaviour of code that was there before. Do you re-define any hooks?
Konrad.
Mark McGranaghan
Thanks for trying the library, I'm glad you found it useful. It should
not redefine any existing behaviour - could you share a REPL session
showing the behavior that seemed to change?
- Mark
On Jan 3, 2009, at 7:31 AM, Konrad Hinsen <konrad...@laposte.net>
wrote:
Konrad Hinsen
> Thanks for trying the library, I'm glad you found it useful. It should
> not redefine any existing behaviour - could you share a REPL session
> showing the behavior that seemed to change?
Nothing except what the library is supposed to do: clean up the
backtrace printouts. I am wondering how a simple (use) can change the
way the backtrace is printed.
Konrad.
Mark McGranaghan
For example, if I do:
user=> (use 'clj-backtrace.repl)
user=> ("foo")
user=> (.printStackTrace *e)
It prints the normal Java backtrace. If instead I do:
user=> (use 'clj-backtrace.repl)
user=> ("foo")
user=> (pst)
It prints the cleaned backtrace. Could you provide REPL sessions like
these that indicate the unexpected behavior?
- Mark
Konrad Hinsen
> It prints the cleaned backtrace. Could you provide REPL sessions like
> these that indicate the unexpected behavior?
Sorry for the false alarm: I had used different shell scripts for
launching Clojure with and without your library, and I just
discovered that they also use different Clojure versions, one of them
being pretty old. That's the real cause for the differences I saw!
Konrad.
