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Improve stack traces for exceptions thrown at a top-level #6271

@fresheneesz

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@fresheneesz
  • Version: 5.1.0
  • Platform: Centos 6.x
  • Subsystem: require

When exceptions are thrown at a top level, there's a distinct lack of information as far as how that module was required. If you have a dependency chain where a requires b which requires c, if c throws an exception while building its module, node doesn't tell you about b or a, which can make it difficult to debug things when there are interactions between modules or global variables.

For example, I'm seeing this exception:

Error: Logger not yet initialized! Initialize first!
    at Error (native)
    at init (/home/vagrant/backend/git/node_modules/logger.js:116:19)
    at eval (eval at proto (/home/vagrant/backend/node_modules/proto/proto.js:57:34), <anonymous>:3:39)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/vagrant/backend/git/node_modules/security.js:7:31)
    at Module._compile (module.js:425:26)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:432:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:313:12)
    at Module.require (module.js:366:17)
    at require (module.js:385:17)

This doesn't tell me what file required security.js, which would be incredibly helpful to me right now in debugging this problem with my code. Also, the part of the stack trace containing internal node stuff is very unlikely to be useful to a developer unless what they're developing is node itself. I want to suggest that a stacktrace like the following be generated instead:

Error: Logger not yet initialized! Initialize first!
    at Error (native)
    at init (/home/vagrant/backend/git/node_modules/logger.js:116:19)
    at eval (eval at proto (/home/vagrant/backend/node_modules/proto/proto.js:57:34), <anonymous>:3:39)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/vagrant/backend/git/node_modules/security.js:7:31)
    required by (db.js:4:16)
    required by (utils.js:9:26)
    required by (server.js:21:20)
    required by (appServer.js:3:36)

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