Re: Guile 1.5.4 beta ready for testing.

[Chris Cramer]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 12:45:48AM -0500, Keith Wright wrote:
> I can't believe I am reading this; it's so 1950's.  Which do you
> hear more often, complaints that somebody's program doesn't work or
> begging for 50% faster crashes?  I am not sure what ``debugging''
> does, but how long can it take to print an error message and die?
> Nobody is asking for logging every procedure call, but it ought
> to be possible to remember what file you are loading and print
> the name when you catch the error.

Maybe I used the wrong argument, but the slowness of Guile startup just
really, really annoys me. It also annoys me that people are often telling
me that they don't use Guile because it's slow.

But I don't think we're fundamentally disagreeing about this particular
issue. Getting useful information when a program dies is certainly more
important than how fast the program runs.

Just remembering the file and printing the name when catching an
error (or providing other moderately useful information) shouldn't add
anything significant to the runtime. But AFAIK turning on debugging does
a lot more than that. What we should do is improve the error messages
and I don't think debugging mode is necessary for that.

-- 
C. Ray C. aka Christopher Cramer
address@hidden
http://www.pyro.net/~crayc/