You know your port is in trouble when…

In porting BioJava, I came across the following comment:

Don’t use this class directly. This class contains deep voodoo code. Run away while you still can.

Looking a bit deeper at the class, it generates code on the fly.  That wouldn’t, in itself, be too bad, except it doesn’t generate Java and compile it, it generates bytecode!

Here is a small snippet:

        GeneratedCodeMethod init = pclass.createMethod(
                "<init>",
                voidC,
                new CodeClass[]{
                  faceClassC,
                  projectionContextC
                },
                CodeUtils.ACC_PUBLIC);

        InstructionVector initIV = new InstructionVector();
        initIV.add(ByteCode.make_aload(init.getThis()));
        initIV.add(ByteCode.make_aload(init.getVariable(0)));
        initIV.add(ByteCode.make_aload(init.getVariable(1)));
        initIV.add(ByteCode.make_invokespecial(m_ourBase_init));
        initIV.add(ByteCode.make_return());
        pclass.setCodeGenerator(init, initIV);

Uh, yeah.  I can read and write Java, but I’m no expert, and I’ve certainly never looked at Java bytecode.  To make matters worse, the code uses the “continue label” construct, like the following (the “more code” placeholder is about 150 additional lines):

        METHOD_MAKER:
        for (Iterator methIt = faceClassC.getMethods().iterator(); methIt.hasNext();) {
          CodeMethod faceMethod = (CodeMethod) methIt.next();
          Set baseMethods = baseClassC.getMethodsByName(faceMethod.getName());

          if (baseClassC.getMethodsByName(faceMethod.getName()).size() > 0) {
            for(Iterator i = baseMethods.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
              CodeMethod meth = (CodeMethod) i.next();
              if( (meth.getModifiers() & CodeUtils.ACC_ABSTRACT) == 0) {
                //System.err.println("Skipping defined method: " + faceMethod.getName());
                continue METHOD_MAKER;
              }
            }
          }

          // ...more code...
        }

I’m not saying it’s bad code; I’m just saying it’s not going to be much fun to port, especially given the lack of unit tests on these bits and the fact that I’ve never generated C# code on the fly, either.

Ah, well, at least they warned me with that comment up top.