Parrot Embed Grant - Report #6
Thu, 02-Jun-2011 by
Makoto Nozaki
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_Jonathan Leto wrote:_
I am excited to announce that I have completed my next grant milestone! I recently increased test coverage of extend_vtable.c to over 95% ("95.5%":http://tapir2.ro.vutbr.cz/cover/latest-c_cover/src-extend_vtable-c.html to be exact), achieving the milestone with a half percent buffer. It definitely wasn't easy, but I changed the way I was approaching writing tests and it resulted in a "huge burst of productivity":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/compare/5dd8c543ab...8c04cc3e66.
I went through a test coverage report and wrote down, on an actual piece of paper, every function that had no test coverage. This allowed me to circle the functions that I thought would be easiest to write tests for, and quickly got those out of the way. I then went for uncovered functions that were similar to already covered functions, and then finally I got to the hard functions.
This was a fruitful exercise, because it was decided by Parrot developers that some VTABLE functions escaped accidentally and that they should be removed from the public API. Whiteknight++ "removed Parrot_PMC_destroy (extra points for humor)":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/cbfc76e64acf9f0a526b5f7da0e4c6c4ec0d1189, which I was using incorrectly in the extend_vtable tests and which was actually coredumping Parrot, but only on certain platforms. I then removed "Parrot_PMC_mark":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/cd1edef38c9f7d4af8ec3229fa166e4fe92d21f6 and "Parrot_PMC_invoke":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/44a9634f2764ccccfd7a5cbad1552159fc73bff8, the first being an implementation detail of the garbage collector, and Parrot_PMC_invoke because it was the only function that returned a '''Parrot_Opcode_t*''' and basically not fit for public consumption.
I also "created a ticket (TT#2126)":http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/2126 for a bug in the Parrot_PMC_morph function, which has some possibly buggy but definitely unspecified behavior.
The remaining, untested functions in extend_vtable are clone_pmc, cmp_pmc, get_pointer_keyed_int, get_pointer_keyed_str, remove_vtable_override, set_pointer_keyed and set_pointer_keyed_str. I leave the testing of these functions as an exercise to the interested reader :)
<big>Grant Refactoring</big>
This reminds me of a saying, I can't remember it exactly, but it is something about the best laid plans of camels and butterflies often taste like onions. Anyway, since I wrote my grant, the Parrot Embed API was deprecated and replaced with a shinier and better documented system. After talking with cotto++ and whiteknight++ on IRC, it was decided that working on test coverage for the new embed API was a better use of resources than writing tests for the old embed API that my original grant referred to, which will most likely be removed from Parrot soon.
The new embed API is called "src/embed/api.c":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/master/src/embed/api.c and the plan is to replace my grant milestone of 95% coverage of embed.c with 95% coverage of embed/api.c, which is currently at "72%":http://tapir2.ro.vutbr.cz/cover/latest-c_cover/src-embed-api-c.html coverage.
To summarize, I have two grant milestones left, increasing extend.c (currently at "61%":http://tapir2.ro.vutbr.cz/cover/latest-c_cover/src-extend-c.html) and embed/api.c to 95% coverage.
Given the lessons learned from testing extend_vtable and based on the fact that I have already "made some headway":https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/b59b869c9dd6f51109aa41e495082e09844ba348, my new estimate for these milestones is three weeks each. To make this more definite, I plan to be done with this grant work by July 15th.
This is the home stretch! I can feel it in my bones.
_Original article at "dukeleto.pl":http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/2011/05/parrot-embed-grant-update-6-still-hackin-less-slackin.html ._
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