Warning: This is the manual of the legacy Guile 2.0 series. You may want to read the manual of the current stable series instead.
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The behavior of the backtrace
procedure and of the default error
handler can be parameterized via the debug options.
Display the current settings of the debug options. If setting is
omitted, only a short form of the current read options is printed.
Otherwise if setting is the symbol help
, a complete options
description is displayed.
The set of available options, and their default values, may be had by
invoking debug-options
at the prompt.
scheme@(guile-user)> backwards no Display backtrace in anti-chronological order. width 79 Maximal width of backtrace. depth 20 Maximal length of printed backtrace. backtrace yes Show backtrace on error. stack 1048576 Stack size limit (measured in words; 0 = no check). show-file-name #t Show file names and line numbers in backtraces when not `#f'. A value of `base' displays only base names, while `#t' displays full names. warn-deprecated no Warn when deprecated features are used.
The boolean options may be toggled with debug-enable
and
debug-disable
. The non-boolean keywords
option must be set
using debug-set!
.
Modify the debug options. debug-enable
should be used with boolean
options and switches them on, debug-disable
switches them off.
debug-set!
can be used to set an option to a specific value. Due
to historical oddities, it is a macro that expects an unquoted option
name.
Stack overflow errors are caused by a computation trying to use more
stack space than has been enabled by the stack
option. There are
actually two kinds of stack that can overflow, the C stack and the
Scheme stack.
Scheme stack overflows can occur if Scheme procedures recurse too far deeply. An example would be the following recursive loop:
scheme@(guile-user)> (let lp () (+ 1 (lp))) <unnamed port>:8:17: In procedure vm-run: <unnamed port>:8:17: VM: Stack overflow
The default stack size should allow for about 10000 frames or so, so one usually doesn’t hit this level of recursion. Unfortunately there is no way currently to make a VM with a bigger stack. If you are in this unfortunate situation, please file a bug, and in the meantime, rewrite your code to be tail-recursive (see Tail Calls).
The other limit you might hit would be C stack overflows. If you call a primitive procedure which then calls a Scheme procedure in a loop, you will consume C stack space. Guile tries to detect excessive consumption of C stack space, throwing an error when you have hit 80% of the process’ available stack (as allocated by the operating system), or 160 kilowords in the absence of a strict limit.
For example, looping through call-with-vm
, a primitive that calls
a thunk, gives us the following:
scheme@(guile-user)> (use-modules (system vm vm)) scheme@(guile-user)> (debug-set! stack 10000) scheme@(guile-user)> (let lp () (call-with-vm (the-vm) lp)) ERROR: In procedure call-with-vm: ERROR: Stack overflow
If you get an error like this, you can either try rewriting your code to
use less stack space, or increase the maximum stack size. To increase
the maximum stack size, use debug-set!
, for example:
(debug-set! stack 200000)
But of course it’s better to have your code operate without so much resource consumption, avoiding loops through C trampolines.
Previous: Pre-Unwind Debugging, Up: Programmatic Error Handling [Contents][Index]