While I've been enjoying the fantastic performance improvements we've seen from Cog onward, one thing I've been less excited about are some of the stability/functionality issues I've been running into. They are not numerous (maybe 1/2 dozen or so major ones in the last 5 years) but they are getting quite tedious to isolate and replicate. Recent examples that come to mind include the 64-bit primHighResClock truncation and 'could not grow remembered set' issues (My current joy is a case where I have an #ifTrue: block that doesn't get executed unless I convert it to an #ifTrue:ifFalse: with a noop for the ifFalse:.. I'll provide a reproducible test case as soon as I'm able. The specific issue isn't the issue, but rather that I keep hitting things like this that seem rather fundamental yet edge-casey at the same time)
I don't expect perfection as a phenomenal amount of progress is being made by a small group of people but I am beginning to wonder if the existing unit tests are sufficient to adequately exercise the VM? I.e. so that the VM developers are aware that a recent change may have broken something or are the existing tests mainly oriented towards image and bytecode VM development? Just some food for thought and wanted to see if it's just me having these sorts of issues...
Thanks, Phil