On Jun 25, 10:09 pm, Four of Seventeen <fsevent...@gmail.com> wrote: > Meanwhile I guess I'll fall back on the old, tedious debugging method > for cases like this: break everything up into separate modules and try > to compile each one until I find the one with the error, and then > whittle that one down until I've isolated the particular bit of code > Clojure doesn't like, then try to figure out what, if anything, is > wrong with it and tweak it until it works.
OK, now it's hair-pulling-out time. I started by moving a large number of general-purpose utility functions and macros to a separate file, namespace, and NetBeans project and adding it as a library to my original one, upon deciding that a lot of this stuff is really not application-specific and will be reusable outside of the one project. I also documented some functions, made others private, and tweaked a few things, as well as sorting out the imports in both projects. The utility project built without a hitch, so I figured the error hadn't been in that code. (Very little of it was new, so, not surprising.) Then I tried to build the main project. I ran into some ordinary errors (missing imports, classpath fiddliness, and so forth, plus a handful of compile errors in the new code I'd added since the last successful load-file of that project's one source file) and fixed these one by one, expecting to get the "Unknown constant tag 116" error after a while, whereupon I was going to call it a night, and tomorrow continue to break up the project into additional separate source files by function (DAL code here, GUI code there, &c.) but ... It didn't happen. I didn't change anything in the main project except to remove functions and macros moved to the util project, remove some imports, add a library (the util project), and add a :use of that library. So the error must have been in code that I removed, most likely, code I moved to the utility library. The error must have been in one of the functions I refactored during the move. I made some tweaks, most notably I caught and fixed a bug in the floor function (it was giving floor for floats and positive ratios, but ceil for negative ratios) and changed some macros to use a more idiomatic [[binds] & body] argument syntax instead of just [binds & body] now that they were part of a more public, more reuse-oriented API. I can't recall what else I changed, other than that it wasn't much. More and more, I begin to suspect either a bug in clojure or a bug in enclojure. Rearranging code without changing it much shouldn't ordinarily have such an effect. Particularly, none of the stuff I both moved and changed had been new since the last successful load-file of the original single source file, none of the stuff I moved without changing triggered the error, none of the stuff I neither moved nor changed triggered the error, and I didn't change anything I didn't move except the initial ns block, until I started getting fixable errors from the new code that had formerly apparently caused only the "Unknown constant tag 116" error. In other words, what I've already done seems to mean that that error existed in no individual piece of my code. It didn't exist in the code I didn't move, because it stopped occurring before I changed any of that code; it didn't exist in the code I moved and didn't change, because it stopped occurring without my changing that code; and it didn't exist in the code I moved and did change, because all of that code had been present prior to the changes that caused the "Unknown constant tag 116" to start occurring, and had NOT changed as part of the changes that caused the "Unknown constant tag 116" to start occurring. If the "Unknown constant tag 116" error was not in a specific piece of my code, however, whose semantics are unchanged (except for fixing bugs in the new code and in floor), then it must have been a bug in clojure and/or enclojure, or else somehow a bug in the arrangement of my code. The latter would mean something like a missing import or suchlike, though, and since it had been one monolithic source file ... At this point, I'm chalking it up to a bug in the development tools I'm using, or the language implementation itself. Which is bad. If it happens again, I have no idea how to fix it other than to randomly move stuff around and hope it goes away, knowing that that already worked once by happenstance. And if it stubbornly persists, I'll have to throw my hands up and stop work until a bug-fix is released. I dread the possibility of that occurring. So should you. The mere fact that a developer is now worrying about such a work stoppage is a sign that clojure is not quite ready for prime time after all. We should be able to have confidence that if we write non-buggy code, it will compile and run, without the need for magic rearranging of code to avoid provoking a showstopping implementaton bug. A few recent threads are about evangelizing clojure, getting it accepted as a development language by project managers and the like, so if that sort of thing is a priority, fixing whatever this problem is is a priority. First, we'll need to determine whether it is in clojure itself or enclojure. Unfortunately, I no longer have a source artifact that provokes the bug so I can't set up eclipse and clojure- dev (or whatever) to see if the bug occurs identically there. Perhaps someone here who is a deep wizard with classloaders can guess from the initial bug report. For what it's worth, the stack trace doesn't show anything that looks enclojure-specific, just java.lang and clojure.lang in the cause exception, which has me leaning towards clojure itself containing the bug -- the worst-case scenario. (At this point, we might even want to start considering a bug in JAVA ITSELF, or in Sun's JVM. user=> (System/getProperty "java.version") "1.6.0_13" in case this helps. 32-bit client VM on 32-bit Windows Vista on a 32- bit, 2.5GHz dual-core Intel machine with 3GB RAM.) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
