Since the end of last December I have been working on a new "reflection core"
for BSF4ooRexx on the
Java side in every free minute (including evenings and weekends). The reason
being that with Java 9
some internals in the reflection area got changed and issue warnings, and it is
announced that with
future versions of Java these warnings will be changed to errors.
As I would like to support a Java baseline of 1.6/6 the new reflection logic
has to work also on
Java 1.6/6, 1.7/7 and 1.8 in addtion to Java 9. So whenever there are
fundamental changes in the
experimental code I test them against all these versions on the same machine
using ooRexx 5.0 beta
without rebooting. Needless to say there may be bugs that show up after such a
change. In order to
be sure that the new functionality is on par with the current functionality I
regularly employ test
unit runs taking advantage of the latest ooRexx test unit framework
("ooRexxTest").
The observation and reason why I post this on the ooRexx developer list is the
following: from time
to time there have been quite surprising problems that have shown up. In a
couple of instances I
literally traced down for weeks (!) all kind of execution threads of the
library and the BSF4ooRexx
infrastructure to understand what is happening. Well, yesterday, in despair, I
killed rxapi and
re-ran the test suit and surprisingly, the unexplainable, erratic surfacing
errors went away! One
such error was for instance that turning a Java null into an ooRexx .nil by
sending an object proxy
string to Rexx indicating the object named ".NIL" causing a replacement with
.nil ("The NIL object")
all of a sudden would assign the string value of the environment symbol .NIL
instead (if res=".NIL"
then res=.nil) ! After killing rxapi and re-running the test suit everything
worked as it should,
the unexplainable errors went away!
So it seems that there is state in rxapi that can affect a newly created Rexx
interpreter. In my
complex test environment it seems that when errors occur over time eventually
rxapi seems to be
affected and in turn newly started Rexx interpreters may get affected as well!
In case others experience such a phenomenon killing rxapi may save you a lot of
time!
---rony
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