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djberg96 (2603)

djberg96
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Journal of djberg96 (2603)

Wednesday July 30, 2003
09:58 PM

Premature release

[ #13797 ]
Dear Abby,

Matz is going to release 1.8 within the next few days and, quite frankly, I don't think it's ready.

Maybe some Ruby programmers will read this and be mad at me for saying so, but I gotta call it like I see it. Tonight I was able to cause the latest preview to segfault with a relatively simple operation. Who knows how many lurk? I was also *SHOCKED* at how many warnings there were when it was compiled with -Wall (and no, that's not a "Larry" joke). I wasn't expecting a release until Christmas or so, but Matz wants to get a release out in time for Panther it seems.

I know you're always supposed to compile with -Wall, but I often didn't for a long time (except for my own pure C progs) because I was either installing software via pkgadd (which are precompiled) or I assumed that developers of major projects always built with -Wall (if not -Wall -W) so I never really worried about it too much.

My naivete' in that regard is gone. I have entered "CC='gcc -Wall'" permanately in my .bashrc file and I always check the Makefile to make sure that it was picked up. I've also been relentless lately not only in going back over my own C extensions and eliminating as many warnings as I can (some you can't get rid of), but also in letting other people know about warnings in *their* code (in a polite manner, I hope).

Anyway, I'll just keep submitting bug reports in the meantime.

Yours truly,

Frustrated


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  • I agree with you. As much as I would want it released now, I would rather it be released when it is ready and not to make a OSX release.

    I do wish speed would be a focus as well.

    • I suspect a few others feel the same way. Note the delay announcement from Matz.

      "I do wish speed would be a focus as well."

      I agree. I've already brought it up on the ML in the past, with benchmarks so there's not much else I can do. There are a couple places where 1.8 is faster (especially on Windows) but overall it's slower.

      We need to get some hardcore C hackers to come in and go over the code (especially io.c) with a fine-toothed comb.

  • Its only been two years since we turned -Wall on in Perl. It took a lot of work (something like 50 patches between 5.6 and 5.8) to clean it up, a few months before we knocked out most of them. There was some bitching because a lot of the warnings weren't "real" (ie. they didn't reveal a problem) and a bit of hell to walk through WRT unused variables and all the #ifdefs [mpe.mpg.de], but in the end it was worth it for a clean build and finding a bunch of little nigling bugs.

    Its interesting to look at what building Pe

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