On 5/22/15 3:07 PM, Walter Bright via dmd-internals wrote:
I have pulled the ones you needed for DDMD, and I pulled them because it
was necessary in order to make DDMD work.
Of course it's a judgement call, but refactorings that are not
productive share one or more of these characteristics:
1. potatoe potahto name changes
2. indentation/whitespace/reformatting
3. the number of lines of code increases
4. re-ordering functions in a file
5. moving code from one file to another
6. large diffs with no seeming point to them
7. large diffs that are not reviewable because github diff is unhelpful
with figuring out what actually changed
8. make dmd slower
Essentially, refactorings that "bounce the rubble" around are going to
be viewed negatively.
Refactorings that would be viewed with favor:
1. identifying significant common code sequences out and consolidating
into reusable functions
2. better encapsulation
3. more logical flow of control
4. reduction in cyclomatic complexity
5. move towards making functions pure
For example, I recently did a small refactor that replaced argc/argv
manual memory management with the Strings type. It removed a bunch of
code, and the rest flowed a lot better.
I've pulled a lot of refactorings. My concern with this is the large
increase in regressions. Those refactorings should be reducing
regressions - but it seems that at best they are not helping, and at
worst are making things worse. I'm also concerned that people are not
working on the real problems with DMD, and instead are doing
refactorings. We have a lot of open regressions, and no proposed fixes
for them. But we've got refactorings regularly appearing. I know that
refactorings are more fun than regression fixes. But we've got to get
the bread and butter work done.
And lastly, I am swamped with work. I'm the only one working on range
fixes for Phobos - fixes that I have been advocating for a couple years
now, and nobody has done anything to move this forward. So I am doing
it. This range-ification is, quite frankly, absolutely critical to D's
future success. I must get it done. But I get bogged down in
interminable reviews of refactorings with hundreds of lines of rubble
bouncing.
I quoted this all because I so much agree with it. Brilliantly put. --
Andrei
_______________________________________________
dmd-internals mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
