1 Quick Instructions🔗ℹ

First, throw away ".zo" versions of your program—at least for the modules or files that should be instrumented for error reporting or profiling.

Then,

  • If your program has a module file prog, run it with

      racket -l errortrace -t prog

  • If your program has a module file prog with a submodule sub, run it with

      racket -l racket/init -l errortrace -e '(require (submod prog sub))'

  • If your program is a non-module top-level sequence of definitions and expressions, you can instead add

    (require errortrace)

    to the beginning of the program, or start Racket with the -l option before the arguments to load your program:
      racket -l racket/init -l errortrace -f prog

  • If you have no main program and you want to use Racket interactively, include the -i flag before -l:
      racket -i -l errortrace
    The order of the flags is important.

  • To instrument the contents of a collection or package, compile it with:
      raco setup -j 1 --mode errortrace ...
    Note that because --mode doesn’t support parallel builds, -j 1 is required unless you are building packages on a single-core machine

After starting errortrace in one of these ways, when an exception occurs, the exception handler prints something like a stack trace with most recent contexts first.

The errortrace module is strange: Don’t import it into another module. Instead, the errortrace module is meant to be invoked from the top-level, so that it can install an evaluation handler, exception handler, etc.

To reuse parts of the code of errortrace, import errortrace/errortrace-lib. That library contains all of the bindings described here, but does not set the compilation handler or the error display handler.