This functionality would definitely be appreciated.
Beware though, that gcc folks made a controversial decision to set "no frame pointer" flag as a default on 64bit POSIX.
Actually this is default on almost all compilers and platforms with even minimal optimization. Including MSVC. I've tried at the beginning naively walk on frame pointers and of course failed with optimized versions.
That also means that backtrace() will be either very inefficient (in my tests it was more than 100x slower than when the frame pointers are included)
I've tested and collecting backtrace on my quite deep project's stack that actually gives about 20 functions gives me on x86_64 and x85 /Linux, gcc-4.3 (different CPUs for 32 and 64) In one case I had thrown normal exception and in other exception with backtrace collection. Platform flags throw+bt throw frames collected x86_64 -02 -g 50 mu 10mu 20 x86_64 -03 20 mu 7mu 11 x86 -02 -g 4mu 4mu 13 x86 -03 4mu 4mu 13 So it seems to be 5 times slower int throw in x86_64 using -g -O2 and 3 times slower when using -O3. IMHO it is tolerable difference for such value.
or unstable. It actually crashes sometimes. [...] Scary.
Can you give me more information about it? Do you have any references? Because if backtrace crashes I would likely just not use this feature and this library would not be actually created. Artyom