01 June 2006

Fixing Millions of Errors and Warnings

Erik Schwiebert, one of our Dev leads here at MacBU has begun to blog. We sometimes develop nick names for folks, often because of duplication of first names, and I believe Erik fell in to this category sometime ago. He's pseudonym became Schwieb and as you can see by his blog URL, the name stuck. Erik is a quintessential geek and he and his team have done an amazing job as they have worked on getting Office to work in Xcode.

In his most recent post he writes about our work to transition our massive Office code base to Xcode. How would you feel if in your first pass at getting your project moved to Xcode the compiler reported back "almost a million errors and several million warnings!"? In the end, I agree with Erik, this transition is helping us to clean up our code in a million different ways, and that is a Good Thing.

Update: Erik has posted a followup here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do you see as the main way to clean up code?

Anonymous said...

I've been 'Schwieb' since junior high school... One of my friends then was named Eric, and it was too confusing to have two Eri[k|c]s, so everybody called me Schwieb. I've answered to it ever since.

David Weiss said...

Ellen Weber asks, "What do you see as the main way to clean up code?"

I'd start with getting rid of all compile errors and warnings.

Anonymous said...

Assuming you spend 1 minute per compile error or warning, one million of them would need to 2083 man.day to correct. Not sure we can expect an UB real soon...