I do remember trying to use -prof, and being unable to make it work --- but it's too long ago to remember the details. I think it was something about being unable to find a prof version of one of the libraries I was linking to?

I did also try the ghci interactive debugger, and couldn't make that work either. Now, I like command line debuggers, but I found the ghci one utterly opaque. I did eventually get it to catch the exception... but then it wouldn't tell me where it happened.

In general, trying to track down the exception was an utterly miserable experience. I do understand that Haskell has special needs when it comes to order of evaluation, due to the way that thunks are unwound, which means that traditional stepping and stack frames are of little use; but this desperately needs to be better. And work out of the box.

Regarding avoiding exceptions... yeah, I'd love to, but it wasn't my code which was throwing the exception.