john13@garfield.MUN.EDU (John Russell) (01/09/89)
Given that there are some hidden gotchas that will cause programs written even by careful and competent Amiga programmers to cause problems on machines with faster processors, more and different kinds of memory, MMUs, etc. How about this for a kind of "safety net" which would allow people to ensure they were following good programming practice even if they didn't have a 68030 equipped Amiga with 32-bit ram and MMU: - a set of stub routines that could be SetFunctionned into place before testing out new software. These would include: AllocMem - stick a tag onto the memory block stating what type of memory was requested, possibly also address of task that requested it drawing functions - these would check to make sure that the rastport they were acting on was in a block of memory allocated as PUBLIC, the bitmaps they were acting on were CHIP, etc. I don't know what else -- whatever other warnings that you know people will overlook, which could be trapped inside a system routine. Whenever an offense was found you could pop up a requester saying what guideline had been violated. As an option, you could make it possible to disable a specific warning once it had been given once to avoid thousands of occurrences of the same requester. - a library of debugging calls that would be able to interact with the replacement system routines The first thing I can think of is a function you could call just before exiting which would ensure that all AllocMems made by your task had been freed properly. While these things would impose significant overhead on the system, you could at least run software through them before releasing it... this would catch programs that needed to be FixHunked, system structures not in public memory, and probably dozens of other things that might break, but which I'm not even aware of :-). There might not be a way to find self-modifying code, improper access of exception vectors and many others, but at least it would prevent many of the honest slips that we all make. John -- "I figured there was this holocaust, right, and the only ones left alive were Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and the Cleavers." -- Wil Wheaton explains why everyone in the Next Generation is so nice
Classic_-_Concepts@cup.portal.com (01/10/89)
> a set of stub routines ...
ah yes, couldn't resist, so no flames, but the best puns
are often unintentional! Wouldn't be surprised if this
one catches on! J. Petersen