Code critiques in the Pharo debugger

Code critiques are the result of analysis tools that notify programmers of code smells or refactoring possibilities, among others. One such implementation exists in the Pharo IDE, where critiques are displayed in class and method views. However, in Pharo, there are other ways to modify the source code of a program. In particular, one can use a debugger or object inspector to directly alter the source code as the program runs. As a result, some programmers tend to do most of their implementation work from within these tools instead of the static code editor. Adding code critiques to the debugger opens up new possibilities. Since there is run-time information is available, code critiques could take advantage of this. An example where this can be useful is string concatenation. In Pharo, when concatenating a String with another object, for example, 'a', b, b needs to be a String (or more precisely, an indexable object). However, at compile time, we can not know what the type of b is. When debugging a program however, we know the type of b. A code critique could take advantage of this and warn a programmer that the right-hand side is not a String. Taking this a step further, we could also associate a "quick-fix" with a rule that transforms the source code, in this example from 'a', b to 'a', b asString.

This project involves the following main parts:

This project focuses on the infrastructure rather than individual rules. While sample rules will be required for demonstration and testing, the goal is not to come up with a complete set of good rules. The proposal is open-ended on purpose and only a rough outline of what can be done with code critiques when brought to the debugger.

This project is intended as a seminar or bachelor thesis project.

Contact

Claudio Corrodi