Fun With Code

Saturday, May 07, 2005, at 08:42PM

By Eric Richardson

I spent all day working on an enormous rabbit trail I got sucked down with eThreads. It all started yesterday, when I decided I really needed to get my act together and get category support working in eThreads. I got working on that, and then got an idea in my head that I wanted to do something that seemed simple and nifty, but didn't work right when I implemented it. So what do I do? Of course I don't say "Oh that was dumb, let's just do it the old reliable way." No. Instead, I say, "Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if I entirely redefined this huge piece of how eThreads works?"

And now, 14 hours or so of coding later, I just checked a 4000+ line diff into revision control. My crazy idea works, but something's leaking a good bit of memory and I have no idea if I've put speed holes in my hood or just shot my speed (extra points if you know the Simpsons reference).

On the plus side, none of the new components show up near the top of my initial profiling, so I think that's a good sign.