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Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"Posted Feb 6, 2013 9:23 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" by zlynx Parent article: Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"
I feel your pain and of course I would like to set up some Inquisition where programmers are tortured until they carefully handle and document every error case and return condition in every line of their program. However, I think you are being unfair in attributing this to dynamic languages. There is a huge amount of C code which doesn't handle error cases well, resulting in your application going kaboom when using network shares and so on. C++ and Java give you a richer toolset for handling error conditions but they still can't force programmers to use it sanely; and again, there is plenty of code in those languages with terrible error handling.
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Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 6, 2013 17:22 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Well, actually it's pretty hard to screw up exception handling in Java due to checked exceptions. You have to write additional code to ignore an error, there's not much more a language can do.
(and no, you shouldn't take this to mean that I somehow endorse Java. I don't, it plain sucks as a language.)
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 6, 2013 21:45 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
And for C/C++ there is usually a compiler option to warn/error about ignored function return values. This is incredibly useful and should be required.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 6, 2013 21:58 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Unfortunately, C code that meticulously collects the return value of everything that can fail essentially-harmlessly is a real pain in the neck to read, because it's salted either with cast-to-void or with piles of pointless error-checking logic. (I hate reading C code where some coding-standards martinet has insisted that all printf() calls must be cast to void.)
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 8, 2013 14:51 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
> And for C/C++ there is usually a compiler option to warn/error about ignored function return values.
What's GCC's option for that?
You can use __attribute__((warn_unused_result)) but putting that on every function returning non-void is hardly practical, let alone portable.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 12, 2013 19:51 UTC (Tue) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] -Wno-unused-result exists, according to the gcc(1) manual page.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 12, 2013 20:21 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
The -Wno-unused-result option does exactly the opposite of what is wanted: it turns off the warning which would otherwise be issued for functions which have been tagged with __attribute__((warn_unused_result)). You still have to tag specific functions whose results should not be ignored. There does not appear to be an option to enable the warning for all non-void functions by default.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 12, 2013 21:03 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Enabling the warning for all non-void functions by default leads to code being liberally salted with futile error-checking and/or casts-to-void.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 12, 2013 22:56 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Futile?
Nope. Apart from maybe printf() - most of the error checking is necessary for secure code.
It just shows that exception handling is really much better than return codes when you want something that's reliable _and_ easy to read.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 12, 2013 21:04 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
You are right that there is no global option in GCC. I was thinking of the per-function attribute.
Warnings about unused results are also common in code analysers like Splint and others.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 1:44 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
> Well, actually it's pretty hard to screw up exception handling in Java due to checked exceptions. You have to write additional code to ignore an error, there's not much more a language can do.
Oh no, there are ways.
Like someone deciding to make a base exception class that extends RuntimeException thus does not need explicit 'try'/'catch' handling or 'throws' declarations.
Sadly, this is not purely hypothetical. I've worked on codebases where this was the case; damn near everything was a runtime exception. It was very explodey.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 6:15 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It was still relatively safe. Explodey programs are bad, but programs which are silently doing the wrong thing are worse. And languages like Javacript or PHP tend to produce exactly such a thing.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 8:23 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
PHP is indeed fucked up, but most of that is just a case of "we made dumb choices once upon a time, and now we can't fix it because then we'd not be backwards compatible".
Nobody really thinks it's a good idea, for example that "0.0" == 0 is true but if(0) and if("0.0") has opposite effects. (i.e. despite the fact that "0.0" is claimed to be equal to 0, nevertheless one of these is considered "true" in a boolean context, while the other is false.
if ( $a == $b && $a && !$b) is potentially true in PHP, and that's just *one* example of the mistakes made while designing this language.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 11:58 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] if ( $a == $b && $a && !$b) is potentially true in PHP, and that's just *one* example of the mistakes made while designing this language. Well, it look like we are in violent agreement, then. JavaScript's analogue: > a = "0" JavaScript is fucked up for the very same reason PHP is fucked up: they try to "silently fix novice's errors" - and in real programs this tends to lead to security holes sooner or later (usually sooner). Neither PHP not JavaScript should be used directly "as is". Never. Solution for PHP: don't. Just forget about PHP and use some other languages if posible. There are many of them: Java, Python, even C or Perl are better then PHP. Just don't. Solution for JavaScript: use some higher-level language which is compiled to JavaScript. There are quite a few contenders at this time: CoffeeScript, TypeScript, even subset of Java (if you use GWT). To add JavaScript to your desktop environment as a primary development tool? Gosh, what are they thinking? Do they hate developers this much?
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 13:38 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Yeah. We appear to agree. I'm just tired of those people who think that these problems can only be solved (or atleast improved upon) by having a statically typed language.
Python is, IMHO proof that it's possible to solve many of these problems and have a cleaner, safer language while remaining dynamically typed.
In Python 0 == "0" is False (indeed 0 == any_string_whatsoever is False)
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 16:25 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Yeah. We appear to agree. I'm just tired of those people who think that these problems can only be solved (or atleast improved upon) by having a statically typed language. These programs can not be ever be solved (you can write Fortran in any language) but they can be reduced. Statically typed languages are on one side of the spectrum (and there there are different shades of gray, too): a lot of problems are detected when you try to compile program. Dynamically typed languages are the next best thing: problems are detected in runtime and end user observes see "[x is out of range]" instead of "there are no page to edit" message, but the PHP is at the other end of spectrum: user does not see anything wrong while it's data is slowly corrupted beyond repair. JavaScript is close behind. Python is, IMHO proof that it's possible to solve many of these problems and have a cleaner, safer language while remaining dynamically typed. Sure. But it still does not make it usable for an industrial projects. Which are defined not by size but by staff turnover: it's not uncommon to see project handled by 4 or 5 generations of programmers in the course of 10 years in a commercial environment - and each generation start with the code but without help from the previous generation. Dynamically typed languages almost wholly unsuitable for such a development, statically typed languages fare much better.
Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?" Posted Feb 7, 2013 12:11 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] Well, actually it's pretty hard to screw up exception handling in Java due to checked exceptions.Including out of memory conditions?
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