An informal guide to better compiler errors



Published on April 27, 2017 under the tag A talk in which I discuss compiler errorsPublished on April 27, 2017 under the tag haskell

Earlier this month I gave a talk at the HaskellX Bytes meetup on how to improve compiler errors.

Haskell is very commonly used to implement DSLs. When you implement one of these DSLs, the focus is usually performance or correctness. Something that’s not mentioned often is the “quality” of error messages.

In this talk I talked through some techniques to improve various kinds (parser, renamer, modules, interpreter, typechecker) of error messages and discuss how that impacts user experience.

The recording can be watched on their website. Unfortunately I cannot embed it here, but at least you can watch it without creating an account.

The slides can be found here.