--- /dev/null
+@node Stack traces
+@section Stack traces
+
+@c Copyright (C) 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+
+@c Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
+@c under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
+@c any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
+@c Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
+@c copy of the license is at <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html>.
+
+@c Written by Bruno Haible.
+
+Printing a stack trace
+was traditionally seen as a feature of the debugging environment
+and thus only implemented in the debuggers (@command{gdb} etc.).
+However, they are also useful in production code,
+for use in two circumstances:
+@itemize
+@item
+When a problem occurs on a user's machine,
+when the user is merely a user, not a programmer.
+@item
+In unit tests that run in continuous-integration environments.
+In such environments, the virtual machine is discarded
+immediately after the tests have run.
+It is not possible to run a debugger in such environments.
+@end itemize
+@noindent
+And in fact, printing a stack trace is part of the basic runtime system
+in programming languages such as
+Java (@url{https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Throwable.html#printStackTrace--, printStackTrace method}),
+Python (@url{https://docs.python.org/3/library/traceback.html, print_exception method}),
+Go (@url{https://pkg.go.dev/runtime/debug#PrintStack, PrintStack function}),
+and
+ISO C++ 23 (@url{https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/basic_stacktrace, std::stacktrace class}).
+
+Gnulib provides a module @samp{stack-trace} with this feature:
+@code{print_stack_trace ()}
+prints a stack trace of the current thread to standard error.
+
+For it to work best, three requirements need to be met:
+@itemize
+@item
+The @url{https://github.com/ianlancetaylor/libbacktrace, libbacktrace library}
+or GCC's sanitizer library @code{libasan} needs to be installed.
+@item
+The program needs to be compiled with debugging information (option @code{-g}).
+@item
+On macOS, where debugging information
+is stored in a separate directory rather than in the compiled binary
+(see @url{https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10044697/#12827463}),
+the @code{dsymutil} program needs to be used when linking,
+and the debugging information needs to be copied when the program is installed.
+Cf. @url{https://github.com/ianlancetaylor/libbacktrace/issues/122#issuecomment-2122589147}.
+@end itemize
+
+When these requirements are not met, the function @code{print_stack_trace ()}
+either prints a stack trace without source file names and line numbers,
+or prints nothing at all.
+
+Gnulib also provides a module @samp{abort-debug},
+that overrides the @code{abort} function so that
+it prints the stack trace of the current thread, before actually aborting.
+Thus, @code{abort ()} remains the idiom of choice
+for signaling a fatal situation that requires developer attention:
+it is useful both in debugging environments and production code.