Chaotic Java

One of the latest discovered bugs in Yielder, originally thought to be linked to Eclipse, is apparently related to the debugging information usually supplied by compilers. The lack of debugging information made promoting local variables to class members impossible with the current way the yielder works, and new approaches are much more complex.

I’ll try to explain the bug and add some detail about some of the mechanics of compiled code, and some more information about what the yielder does behind the scenes. First, let’s mention the stack frame for a minute. We all know the term from the second most famous method Java has, Throwable.printStackTrace, but what is it really, this “frame”?
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For some people the Yielder test cases didn’t pass properly. Readers Hanson Char and Michael Barker found a bug, which is either caused by the different OS used or the different compiler used (Windows vs. Linux/Mac, or Eclipse vs. Sun/Apple compiler).

At the moment I’m relying on the aforementioned people to help with the bug, as I don’t have a testing ground for it myself – I’m creating one at the moment so that for future bugs I’ll be able to test them through. In the meantime, I’ve started a Google Group for yielder-related discussions so it will be easier to raise problems and collaborate on these sorts of bugs (and hopefully, also collaborate on ideas of how to use this feature).

So thanks, and keep the good (and bad) feedback coming!

It’s definitely been an exciting couple of weeks. Ever since I published the code for the yield-like feature (project site here) there has been a few mentions of it over other blogs (Tech Sweep, Neal Gafter’s blog, Lambda the Ultimate and even a reminder of when not to use such a framework from WarpedJavaGuy).

In a very short time, downloads reached 75. And it makes me wonder: How many of these used it, tried it, had trouble with it? I didn’t get any feedback; and I’d really like some! As for myself, I wrote the yielder for tree iterations, and I use it for that at the moment. It works great, creates the implicit stack and returns the elements at the order chosen – and I’m really happy with it. But what about you?