GHCi has a debugger which I would use if it supported the things I wanted to do, which is to analyse space leaks. Unfortunately it seems to have two limitations which make it essentially unusable for this purpose.
The only bindings it shows are those of the free variables of the expression being evaluated. This behaviour is so restricted that I find it hard to understand how anyone can use the GHCi debugger for any non-trivial purpose.
We originally provided bindings for all variables in scope, rather than just the free variables of the expression, but found that this affected performance considerably, hence the current restriction to just the free variables.
GHCi didn’t have a debugger in version 6.6.1 and by version the next version (6.8.1) this restriction was already in force. It’s not completely clear how hard they’ve tried to remove this restriction.
It doesn’t show (as far as I can tell) any information about the
structure of an unevaluated closure. In fact, this seems to be not
a weakness of the debugger specifically but GHCi generally. The
:print command doesn’t show the structure of closures.
> let foo = [1,2 :: Int]
> let bar = foo ++ foo
> :print bar
bar = (_t20::[Int])I really want to see something like the following, otherwise the debugger is completely useless for diagnosing space leaks. We need to see when we’re building up large unevaluated thunks!
> let foo = [1,2 :: Int]
> let bar = foo ++ foo
> :print bar
bar = (foo ++ foo::[Int])