id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc,lang,patch,platform
1273,Provide a parrot 'backtrace' with assertion failures.,Austin_Hastings,,"When an assertion fails, a C stack trace is provided which is not particularly valuable for determining how to reproduce the problem (short of re-running whatever enormous codeset produces the first failure). For example:
{{{
src/string/api.c:549: failed assertion '(b)->charset'
Backtrace - Obtained 16 stack frames (max trace depth is 32).
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x400d3d62]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0(Parrot_confess+0x9a) [0x400d3eca]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0(Parrot_str_append+0x17c) [0x4005477c]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0(Parrot_str_join+0x160) [0x40054cf0]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x4007985f]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x4011f34e]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x4011d8af]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x400f589f]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x400f5cb0]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0(Parrot_runops_fromc_args+0xc6) [0x400f6a56]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0(Parrot_runcode+0x15e) [0x400d09ce]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0 [0x402bf313]
/usr/local/lib/libparrot.so.1.7.0(imcc_run+0x39c) [0x402bff0c]
/usr/local/bin/parrot [0x8048938]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe5) [0x403c6775]
/usr/local/bin/parrot [0x80487d1]
make: *** [test-attributes] Aborted (core dumped)
}}}

I propose that the assertion-failure code should be extended to also provide a ""backtrace"" (a la the `backtrace` opcode) of the Parrot stack, so that developers can find the particular areas of their code that are experiencing the failure.

Cotto suggested in IRC that the Parrot_confess routine would be the place to make this change.",todo,closed,normal,,none,1.7.0,medium,fixed,,,,,