TMI: More progress

[tim]

I fixed the tests that weren't working yesterday in the typechecker refactoring branch, and I'm running the test suite again -- a few compile-fail tests have failed already, but those should be fun to figure out. (So far I see a few ICEs due to the fact that we're continuing typechecking in more places now, rather than returning early because of seeing an error type.)

My post from yesterday got a few more comments than usual! I'm always glad to get comments on my Rust posts, especially since it can be hard for people who don't use Dreamwidth regularly to comment on my blog, so I appreciate any effort towards that end. Here's how to comment if you don't have a Dreamwidth account.

Also along those lines, I'm well aware that my Rust posts swing wildly back and forth between explaining basic terms and assuming you know about things that you'd only know about if you'd read some obscure module in rustc::middle -- so if you're curious about anything, please don't assume you "should" know what it means and please do ask questions!

Comments

[wild_irises]

You're way out of my tech league, but I learned earlier this month that refactoring has been a major professional area in which my brother has done work. This seems to be one of the key papers.

Just noticing how the streams cross.

[tim]

Yeah, I don't know if I've read that paper, but I've read some that were closely related to it. Those streams crossed a lot time ago and I've definitely run across citations to David's work before :-)

That said, what I was talking about doing in this post is much more mundane. Refactoring just means rewriting code to make it better-organized without changing its meaning. I was doing it in the way programmers do it: manually. Being able to guess what you really meant and avoid a lot of the straightforward work involved is what "automated refactoring" is about, but I wasn't using one of the fancy (and research-quality) tools that do it :-)