02-18-13 - Don't write spaghetti

It never works out. I usually even warn myself about it (by writing comments to myself), but it still catches me out. I also usually give myself a todo item like "hmm this smells funny revisit it", but of course the todos just pile up in a never-ending heap, and little old ones like that get burried.

void DoLZDecompress(const char *filename,...)
{
    struct CommandInfo i;
    i.data = (void *)filename;
    // warning : passing string pointer (not copying) to another thread, make sure it's const / sticks around!
    StartJob( &i );
}

Yup, that's a crash.

void OodleIOQ_SetKickImmediate( bool kick );
/* kick state is global ; hmm should really be per-thread ; makes it a race
*/

Yup, that's a problem, which leads to the later deadlock :

void Oodle_Wait( Handle h )
{
    // @@ ? can this handle depend on un-kicked items, and hence never complete ?
    //  I used to check for that with normal deps but it's hard now with the "permits"
    ...
}

Coding crime doesn't pay. Spaghetti always gets you in the end, with its buggy staining sauce.

Whenever I have one of those "hmm this smells funny, I'm worried about the robustness of this" , yep, it's a problem.

One of my mortal enemies are the "don't worry about it, it'll be fine" people. No it will fucking not be fine. You know what will happen? It'll be a nasty god damn race bug, which I will wind up fixing while the "don't worry about it, it'll be fine" guy is watching lolcatz or browsing facebook.