Monday, July 18, 2005

Cleaning Up

When something just doesn't want to work, it's often a good solution to throw it away. Of course, Python makes this easier than many other languages. A famous quote of Tim Peters springs to mind: 'Python code is easy to throw away.' Additionally, throwing away crappy code can make you feel much better, since your program often becomes cleaner because of it, and you can always get back to the problem later..

Today I commented out the partial unboxing analysis that I had, as well the analysis that tried to work out upper bounds on strings used in reflection. Because now the data flow analysis does not have to consider the allocation sites of simple types anymore, a lot of cruft could be removed from the compiler. I will probably come back to the unboxing analysis after the SoC. The string bounds analysis was intended to help bootstrapping the compiler, but since this will not happen any time soon, I'm not sure if I'll ever revive it.

I intend to spend the following three days or so on getting as much unit tests working again as possible. After that, I will start work on the second milestone. I'm looking forward to that, as it will hopefully be more interesting than fixing bugs all day.. :-)

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