Tuesday 23 April 2013

An Update On Finally Blocks

As I mentioned in my last three posts I have spent some time working on adding filters to the JaCoCo project. I've been meaning to provide a quick update on my progress for some time now.

Back in February I actually completed a rewrite of my finally dedup code. This rewrite dropped the dependency on line number information and instead relies on spotting duplicate bytecode that coincides with try/catch blocks. Unfortunately there turned out to be quite a few edge cases so the resulting code was fairly ugly even though it was in theory using a more sensible approach. I never got round to releasing this rewrite

Marchof, the original author of JaCoCo, started a playground project in February to invstigate how to structure filtering code in a neater way. This was mentioned in the JaCoCo developer mailing list.

I don't think anything further has happened on this since February but I am hoping to find some time to take another look at how to produce a maintainable finally block dedup implementation.

There certainly appears to be some interest in this work as I have been seeing ~60-80 downloads/week of the version of EclEmma which I publish on my own Eclipse update site ever since I first released it in January.