6.2 Debugger panes

6.2.2 Stack pane

The stack pane shows the thread's control stack at the moment it was paused, with certain call frames filtered out. It depicts the stack in a tree view. We call this a stack backtrace or backtrace.

When a debugger window opens, the stack pane opens in expanded form, showing the backtrace details. You can expand and collapse the backtrace in the normal way for a tree view, by clicking + or - symbols. In addition, the menu commands View > Expand, View > Expand All, View > Collapse, and View > Collapse All control expansion.

Note: The stack pane may not always contain exactly what you expect to see. First, a function call you expect to see might have been optimized away during compilation. Second, because the stack pane filters out certain call frames by default, a frame you are looking for may only become visible when you change the filtering settings. By default, only frames for Dylan functions defined in or imported into the thread's current module appear in the stack pane. This default setting is indicated by "Filtered visible frames", which appears in the stack pane filtering drop-down list (see Section 2.3.1 on page 29 for information about the drop-down list settings).

Choose the View > Debugger Options dialog's Stack page in the debugger window to control the filtering rules. See "Stack options" on page 129 for details.

You can select any item shown in a backtrace and right-click to produce a pop-up menu. The menu allows you to carry out other operations on them, such as browsing their values or editing their source code representation. Double-clicking an item opens it in the browser.