Hello Jesse, Your link points to Google code which I cannot probably browse due to ACQ restrictions. Anyway, I guess from your message that Google for the sake of user friendliness added messages to NPE exceptions, thus changing the exception order. I accept usability motivation for proposed wiki change. The motivation still have to be compared with performance motivation when NPE are quickly thrown by means of hardware interrupt without any message.
Generally I find usability more important than performance. As for exception messages, I like them only when they add some vital information for a programmer, otherwise they just make information retrieval more challenging. From the other side, there likely exist people who benefit from exception messages if they are localized. As for dropping tests, I'm stil not convinced. Why not to fix tests instead? We have to be continuously improving. P.S. Concerning your question, I faced a problem with SecurityException testing getCertificates() behavior when worked with [1]. I added many non- specification asserts to the tests to understand when SecurityException should be thrown and be somehow compatible. My JIRA does not reference this problem, though extra asserts can be located in the patch to the unit test. Later we got a related bug report [2] concerning the implementation. P.P.S. I was looking for a JIRA issue which references a user applciation fail due to exception order and failed. I have found the author of the automatic tool instead [3]. I think it worth listen to him. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HARMONY-4569 [2] http://markmail.org/thread/ckfp3wy6dhrzjwh7 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HARMONY-325 On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Jesse Wilson <jessewil...@google.com> wrote: > For better or for worse, Dalvik was changed long ago to ignore exception > priorities. We get exception messages for NPEs and save branches. The full > set of deltas are here: > > http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=multiple+errors+lang:java+package:git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/dalvik.git > > 2009/11/17 Alexei Fedotov <alexei.fedo...@gmail.com> >> >> I don't argue changing exception order for a particular case if the >> change improves code simplicity and gives performance benefit on >> important real load, e.g. the change improved Eclipse startup time by >> 4%. >> > > I think the primary difference in our thinking is how much we value > exception priority consistency. I don't believe it has any value and > therefore we're imposing an unnecessary constraint on our code. Does anyone > have a real world example, (perhaps a bugreport) demonstrating where > exception priority incompatibility has caused grief? > -- With best regards / с наилучшими пожеланиями, Alexei Fedotov / Алексей Федотов, http://www.telecom-express.ru/ http://harmony.apache.org/ http://www.expressaas.com/ http://openmeetings.googlecode.com/
