Stacked

I don’t normally blog about other people’s blog entries, but this is fascinating.

I’m a big fan of using a lot of delegation, with small methods and small classes, and I can understand when you’re sitting on a bunch of libraries that think the same way you can end up with these kind of stack traces.

Part of me wonders whether this is actually a problem. Modern IDE’s (e.g. IntelliJ, Resharper, Eclipse) make navigating abstracted delegation chains pretty easy (I’m forever pressing Ctrl(+Alt)+B or Ctrl+Alt+F7 in Resharper), and I would hope that the Managed VMs we use do clever stuff too. That said, I wouldn’t expect to have to understand library code more than a couple of calls outside of my own code, so libraries would have to make sure that their abstractions don’t leak too much.

Thanks to Simon Stewart for the link.