Success story with BlackBox

From: [at]} <Wojtek>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 19:32:03 -0500 (EST)

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Hello everyone:

  I would like to post an uplifting success story
to make it clear how much we are gaining using such
a marvellous software as BlackBox. I dedicate this
story to all my collegaues who are struggling in vain
with C++, root, and other such.

This is a story of a Bug. Bugs happen all the time.
BlackBox does not prevent me from producing bugs
in my code. The question is what happens next,
after the bug is there somewhere waiting to bite.
How much damage is instilled when it bites?

It all happened last Friday evening. We discussed
the data processing algorithm with our student,
who is the first-time BlackBox user. She wrote the code,
and then we took some cosmic-ray data using our acquisition
system written in BlackBox. The spectrum looked good,
so we left it running overnight.

At around 11:46 a particular waveform was acquired
(perhaps due to a power spike?) whose shape was not
what we expected. The data processing procedure was not
prepared for this, and the FOR loop index jumped out
of the array bounds. An illegal memory location
was accessed. The Bug has bitten us from behind.

The C++ users are probably guessing what happened
next. The "segmentation violation - break" error message,
accompanied by "call the program vendor", accompanied by
a program crash, total loss of data, absolute lack of
any clue why all this happened, leading to hours lost
on a frustrating debugging session.

The C++ users are guessing wrong. None of the above
has happened at all. The data which was acquired
before the error was not lost. The acquisition simply
stopped at the point of the error. When I arrived
the next morning, the spectrum was displayed on screen
and I could safely save it to disk.

The "out of bounds" condition was trapped by the BlackBox
runtime environment. The runtime system was intact, and
all the internal variables were preserved. The debugger
window was displayed with a descriptive message telling
what has happened and where. After saving the spectrum
I looked at the debugger window, examined the variables,
and clicked on the link which immediately lead me to
the exact location where the error has occured. The reason
for the error became immediately clear, and I typed in
the appropriate correction of the code. The recompilation
took less than a second, after which I restarted
the acquisition. It all took perhaps five minutes,
which included reading and comprehending the code
written by someone else. Nothing could have been simpler,
and we were sailing again in no time at all.

I told this story to my friends here at the Brookhaven
National Lab. They shook their heads in disbelief
and went straight back to never-ending debugging
of our C++ data analysis code. Our C++ code leaks
memory and crashes for mysterious reasons which nobody
hopes to understand. There is no prospect that it can ever
get any better. In fact, our C++ code is only getting worse,
as it keeps growing and accumulates bugs which nobody
has patience to eradicate.

I dedicate my story to all those who have given up hope
that solid software engineering has ever existed. It did,
and it still does. BlackBox never leaks a single byte
of memory, and I cannot recall the last time it crashed.
However, in order to find such a great tool like BlackBox
one has to open up the mind and start looking beyond
where everyone else is looking. And this may be the biggest
obstacle.

Thank you,

Wojtek Skulski skulski{([at]})nowhere.xy


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Received on Fri Feb 14 2003 - 01:32:03 UTC