Saturday, July 09, 2005

Integration Blues

Okay, so it took me most of the day to be able to support '[x]'. And it still doesn't work perfectly, for example '[x,y]' will require more work. At least I know where the problems lie now, and '[x]' suffices for debugging the iterative analysis. This is because using '[]' several times makes these allocation sites looks alike, obfuscating debug output. The problem was that I did not anticipate object contours to change during analysis, so in the end I just had to make it a bit more dynamic..

With debugging now much easier, it actually became fun to debug some more problems I found in the iterative analysis. To make debugging even more fun, I picked up my habit again of adding unit tests for every new piece of code that I wrote, especially those causing the tiniest of problems. At the moment, no known bugs remain, just.. let's call them 'missing features'.

I guess tomorrow I will start messing around with finding some corner cases, and see how the algorithm works for truly polymorphic containers (when an instance variable of a container object actually takes on different types during run-time). Of course throwing ints and floats into a single list doesn't have to be very efficiently supported (there are probably cases where it's useful, but I haven't seen them). However, in case of inheritance hierarchies, it would be nice if lists with objects of classes from the same hierarchy don't blow up the analysis.. :)

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