[erlang-bugs] Re: [erlang-questions] picky dialyzer

[Kostis Sagonas]

Björn Gustavsson wrote:
> 2011/1/14 Kostis Sagonas <kostis@REDACTED>:
> 
> The crash is in hipe_unified_loader. It crashes the code_server
> process before it has found out that there is no native code
> to load.
> 
>> I can of course investigate and possibly correct this throughout but I am
>> also wondering: is this 0..256 a sane choice? Why on earth one would have
>> such a range? Wasn't Erlang exotic enough without this feature? :-)
> 
> The 0..256 range was an arbitrary choice decided long before
> there was a Dialyzer.
> 
> Actually, I am willing to change the range to 0..255 in the next
> release in order to keep the Dialyzer type simple and beautiful.
> I don't think that there is any code depending on a function
> having 256 arguments, so that change should be safe.

Thanks Bjorn!

I also think this is safe and in any case it's a change for the better.

Actually, it's not dialyzer which is what's difficult to change here, 
but more finding out all places in the hipe compiler and loader where 
there might be implicit assumptions that the function's arity can always 
be stored in a byte.

Kostis