Re: [Caml-list] Exceptions and backtraces

[Jesper Louis Andersen <jesper.louis.andersen@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 12:54 PM, Anders Fugmann <anders@fugmann.net> wrote:

> Another possibility would be to only perform TCO on recursive functions.


Disabling the optimizations works in some cases, but it considerably alters
the characteristics of the executed program. Programs that wouldn't reach
the stack limit suddenly does, and programs that would run fast are now
considerably slower.

In a controlled test situation it may be worthwhile to turn off
optimizations of this kind, but I've always had the feeling that this is
something you have to accept for the real world deployments when requesting
what a program is doing.

As long as you know what is happening, reconstructing the code flow path
usually isn't that hard. And OCaml isn't the only language in which this is
a problem. It hits Standard ML, Erlang, and Haskell too, the latter having
its own additional irregularities due to lazy evaluation. And inlining
optimizations have hit me when using DTrace on C code because the optimizer
decided to inline functions aggressively, which in turn removes those as
targets for function boundary tracing.


-- 
J.

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