Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Bugs

Today was the first bad day I guess, since starting work on the iterative analysis. As with the generics support I worked on before that, it's not something that you can just paste on the compiler and have it work. Because both required rather intrusive modifications, I did not run the unit tests every day while working on them. The result is long debugging sessions, like today.

Spending the whole day fixing 5 or 6 stupid bugs, or 'semantical typos', gave me somewhat of a desparate feeling, partly because I still have 30 unit tests to fix (those that have broken anyway, no idea how many), and there are some larger programs among those. I think it could easily take another week to fix all tests, and make some more actual modifications to the current iterative analysis, that I would like to finish before considering the first milestone to be reached.

For example, it seems my unboxing technique is not going to work well with contours that can be merged.. I would also very much like to spend more time on the iterative analysis itself (istead of bugfixing :/), i.e. compacting contours together, better cleaning out of the allocation site table, working with lists that never flow to an assignment, and be able to merge non-singleton upper bounds together if it is clear they cannot be split later on.

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