More jSuneido Slogging

Another long tedious day working on getting more of our application tests to run on jSuneido.

These are large scale functional tests, so when one fails it's not easy to figure out why. It could take 5 minutes, it could take 5 hours.

I've found a couple of small bugs in jSuneido. One was because BigDecimal differentiates 1 from 1.0 from 1.00, which makes sense from a scientific precision viewpoint, but not when you're dealing with money. And the problem was actually even more obscure - it was because it differentiates 0 from .0 from .00

But the rest of the bugs (the majority) have been in our application code, either in the tests or in the code itself. Nothing serious, most of them were inadvertent dependencies on the order of unordered things.

But it's frustrating. It would be tedious enough doing all this testing to find bugs in jSuneido. But when I'm doing it to find other people's bugs it's annoying. And of course, as with any large body of code, a lot of it is confusing, hard to understand, and could be improved. (Don't get me wrong, I tend to think the same about my own code.)

Oh well, it's got to be done. Hopefully it doesn't take me too much longer.

Systems that Never Stop

An interesting (and entertaining) talk by Joe Armstrong (the principal inventor of Erlang) about writing fault tolerant systems. Well worth watching.

InfoQ: Systems that Never Stop (and Erlang)

A Debuggers Life

Another day of debugging, although with a twist - I found as many bugs in our application code as I did in jSuneido. Just minor stuff - there's nothing like multiple implementations of a language to flush out the edge cases.

It seems like a slow process, but the jSuneido bugs do seem to be getting smaller and more obscure, which gives me a certain amount of confidence that the main stuff is ok. Most stuff just works, which is a vast improvement over not long ago.