3 ms·

Please tell me more! How come the calls to the old code went to nothing? It does not surprise me but I wonder how it happened in this specific instance. Who di

Please tell me more! How come the calls to the old code went to nothing? It does not surprise me but I wonder how it happened in this specific instance. Who did the 900 modules rewrite?

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Instead of declaring a message and creating it with a call to the (now obsolete) module specific to the structure being transmitted, one simply passed the structure to the message-send api. The conversion template to 'Message' automatically rewrote the structure argument as a message argument. I was re-writing the driver as a simple C++ set of pure virtual objects and implementations for my hardware. So when I scavenged code to send a certain structure as a message, I simply didn't make the old calls. I remember I did (for some reason) edit all the old modules to use the new API, to prove it still worked I guess. A long afternoon of search and replace. The (Korean?) company that owned the driver must have had a team or something. It was extremely brain-dead code for every element of an 802.11/ethernet abstraction as a separate module, done twice (once for the driver; once for the module firmware). Double structure definitions for everything. My team wanted a walk-thru of the existing driver. I scheduled two hours, one before lunch and one after. I opened with "I've brought just the 500 most significant modules today, and we're going to walk thru a connection and message send". Proceeded to open dozens of nested module references on a very long path from triggering a connection attempt to exchanging the first message for negotiation. The hour was up. Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.
- richardfey 6y ago
  > Double structure definitions for everything. I wonder if that's because two different teams worked on the two different abstractions. > Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch. I guess that the pain of that first hour convinced them that your rewrite was trustworthy.

Please tell me more! How come the calls to the old code went to nothing? It does not surprise me but I wonder how it happened in this specific instance. Who did the 900 modules rewrite?

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Instead of declaring a message and creating it with a call to the (now obsolete) module specific to the structure being transmitted, one simply passed the structure to the message-send api. The conversion template to 'Message' automatically rewrote the structure argument as a message argument. I was re-writing the driver as a simple C++ set of pure virtual objects and implementations for my hardware. So when I scavenged code to send a certain structure as a message, I simply didn't make the old calls. I remember I did (for some reason) edit all the old modules to use the new API, to prove it still worked I guess. A long afternoon of search and replace. The (Korean?) company that owned the driver must have had a team or something. It was extremely brain-dead code for every element of an 802.11/ethernet abstraction as a separate module, done twice (once for the driver; once for the module firmware). Double structure definitions for everything. My team wanted a walk-thru of the existing driver. I scheduled two hours, one before lunch and one after. I opened with "I've brought just the 500 most significant modules today, and we're going to walk thru a connection and message send". Proceeded to open dozens of nested module references on a very long path from triggering a connection attempt to exchanging the first message for negotiation. The hour was up. Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.

richardfey 6y ago
> Double structure definitions for everything. I wonder if that's because two different teams worked on the two different abstractions. > Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch. I guess that the pain of that first hour convinced them that your rewrite was trustworthy.