Hacker News Reader

Never mind the fact that tail cails are just fundamentally loops, which don't generate any stack frames anyway!

If you're application is complex enough that inspection won't reveal the source of the bug, then stack traces are almost strictly less useful than logging.

View on HN

Tail calls can be used to increase the efficiency of loops simulated using recursion. However, not all tail calls are loops, e.g. void foo() { bar(); }

A good backtrace for a crash or exception can tell me the entire call stack. Logging at that granularity (i.e. every time a function is called) is not a good idea.

Exactly, it's not like a loop counter variable will show up in a stack trace (even if it is a perl style trace, with values, rather than a Java style, line numbers only, stack dump).

This whole debug dump issue could be avoided by saving a copy of the initial entry frame for debugging and the current frame with elipses shown between them when TCE was in effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com