Haiku News ~ Print: #00883 The Fog Lifts for Themis Development.

The Fog Lifts for Themis Development.

Aug 13, 2004 22:33 UTC, by Chris Simmons, Senior Journalist.
From the bitwise-and-older department...

Raymond Rodgers reports on the Themis Project Page that the fog has lifted, a major bug has been squashed, and development is underway.

It seems a misunderstanding of bitwise operations led to a showstopper of a bug that didn't have an obvious pointer as to the cause... Until now.

As he states:

After several months of scratching our heads, we have finally resolved a crashing bug that had been hindering development of the renderer. Frankly, the bug had been a major pain in the butt to find because it gave the symptoms of a stack corruption, and only occurred when the renderer add-on was placed in the add-on directory.

and...

It was then that I realized something important. One of the last printf statements was only displayed if the cache system add-on had been loaded, and my output showed that it had been. The problem was, that I hadn't even built the cache system add-on...! What appeared to be happening was that the renderer add-on was being loaded, which (like any other Themis add-on) triggers a broadcast message notifying all add-ons and message system members that a new add-on was in memory. This message includes information about the plug-in which was being compared bitwise with a specific value to identify the cache plug-in.

We are glad things are back on track, and look forward to another release of the browser soon. Good work Raymond!