Re: [Pharo-dev] DebugSession>>activePC:

[Thomas Dupriez via Pharo-dev]

--- Begin Message --- Yeah, it's a bit unfortunate you assumed I wanted to remove the method. It brought up a not so pleasant discussion.

Everyone makes mistakes. :-)

So if I understand, this method gives the pc that maps to the ast node the debugger should highlight when a context is selected in the stack widget? If I'm right, how comes that this method has no senders in the debugger code? That would mean this feature is also implemented somewhere else.

Thomas

Le 11/01/2019 à 20:28, Eliot Miranda a écrit :

Hi Thomas,

   forgive me, my first response was too terse.  Having thought about it in the 
shower it becomes clear :-)

On Jan 11, 2019, at 6:49 AM, Thomas Dupriez <tdupr...@ens-paris-saclay.fr> 
wrote:

Hi,

Yes, my question was just of the form: "Hey there's this method in DebugSession. 
What is it doing? What's the intention behind it? Does someone know?". There was no 
hidden agenda behind it.

@Eliot

After taking another look at this method, there's something I don't understand:

activePC: aContext
^ (self isLatestContext: aContext)
         ifTrue: [ interruptedContext pc ]
         ifFalse: [ self previousPC: aContext ]

isLatestContext: checks whether its argument is the suspended context (the 
context at the top of the stack of the interrupted process). And if that's 
true, activePC: returns the pc of **interruptedContext**, not of the suspended 
context. These two contexts are different when the debugger opens on an 
exception, so this method is potentially returning a pc for another context 
than its argument...

Another question I have to improve the comment for this method is: what's the high-level 
meaning of this concept of "activePC". You gave the formal definition, but 
what's the point of defining this so to speak? What makes this concept interesting enough 
to warrant defining it and giving it a name?

There are two “modes” where a pc us mapped to a source range.  One is when 
stepping a context in the debugger (the context is on top and is actively 
executing bytecodes).  Here the debugger stops immediately before a send or 
assignment or return, so that for sends we can do into or over, or for 
assignments or returns check stack top to see what will be assigned or 
returned.  In this mode we want the pc of the send, assign or return to map to 
the source range for the send, or the expression being assigned or returned.  
Since this is the “common case”, and since this is the only choice that makes 
sense for assignments ta and returns, the bytecode compiler constructs it’s pc 
to source range map in terms of the pc of the first byte if the send, assign or 
return bytecode.

The second “mode” is when selecting a context below the top context.  The pc 
for any context below the top context will be the return pc for a send, because 
the send has already happened.  The compiler could choose to map this pc to the 
send, but it would not match what works for the common case. Another choice 
would appear be to have two map entries, one for the send and one for the 
return pc, both mapping to the source range.  But this wouldn’t work because 
the result of a send might be assigned or returned and so there is a potential 
conflict.  I stead the reasonable solution is to select the previous pc for 
contexts below the top of context, which will be the pc for the start of the 
send bytecode.

HTH

Cheers,
Thomas

On 11/01/2019 13:53, Tudor Girba wrote:
Hi,

@Eliot: Thanks for the clarifying answer.

I believe you might have jumped to conclusion about the intention of the 
question. Thomas asked a legitimate question. Without users of a method it is 
hard to understand its use. It does not necessarily imply that the intention is 
to remove it, but it does show that someone wants to understand.

As far as I know, Thomas actually wants to write a test to cover that usage. I 
am sure that you appreciate and encourage that :).

@Thomas: Thanks for this effort!

Cheers,
Doru

On Jan 10, 2019, at 3:11 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.mira...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Thomas,

On Jan 10, 2019, at 2:24 AM, Thomas Dupriez via Pharo-dev 
<pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org> wrote:

<mime-attachment>

in a stack of contexts the active pc is different for the top context.  For 
other than the top context, a context’s pc will be pointing after the send that 
created the context above it, so to find the pc of the send one finds the 
previous pc.  For the top context its pc is the active pc.

Typically the debugger is invoked in two different modes, interruption or 
exception. When interrupted, a process is stopped at the next suspension point 
(method entry or backward branch) and the top context in the process is the 
context to be displayed in the debugger.  When an exception occurs the 
exception search machinery will find the signaling context, the context that 
raised the exception, which will be below the search machinery and the debugger 
invocation above that. The active pc of the signaling context will be the of 
for the send of digbsl et al.

So the distinction is important and the utility method is probably useful.

Do you want to remove the method simply because there are no senders in the 
image?

If so, this is indicative of a serious problem with the Pharo development 
process.  In the summer I ported VMMaker.oscog to Pharo 6.  Now as feenk try 
and build a VMMaker.oscog image on Pharo 7, the system is broken, in part 
because of depreciations and in part because useful methods (isOptimisedBlock 
(isOptimizedBlock?) in the Opal compiler) have been removed.

Just because a method is not in the image does not imply it is not in use.  It 
simply means that it is not in use in the base image.  As the system gets 
modularised this issue will only increase.  There are lots of collection 
methods that exist as a library that are not used in the base image and 
removing them would clearly damage the library for users.  This is the case for 
lots of so-called system code.  There are users out there, like those of us in 
the vm team, who rely on such system code, and it is extremely unsettling and 
frustrating to have that system code change all the time.  If Pharo is to be a 
useful platform to the vm team it has to be more stable.

--
www.feenk.com

“The smaller and more pervasive the hardware becomes, the more physical the software 
gets."

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