[Codenarc-developer] Running CodeNarc with a Groovy 1.8 Runtime

[Hamlet D'A. <ham...@gm...>]

Hi all,

As many know, running CodeNarc 0.14 with a Groovy 1.8 runtime produces
many stack overflow exceptions. This issue is fixed in the next
release, 0.15.

The problem is a base problem with Groovy. Method dispatch to the
super class is subtly broken in some class hierarchies when the parent
class is compiled Java. It would be nice if you would vote for the
issue so that we can remove the workaround from our codebase:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-4922

Note for CodeNarc Developers: I am tempted to rewrite our AST visitor
classes and ASTUtil classes in Java, and the rules themselves can be
left in Groovy. The underlying problem of method dispatch between code
compiled with 1.7 and running with 1.8 remains and is worrying. The
rewrite of that small part of CodeNarc would fix the problem for good
and also give some nice performance improvements. I feel like CodeNarc
is at the same place Gradle was about 2 years ago... the core is
implemented in Groovy but as the project grows the benefits of a Java
core start to show themselves. With a Java core we'll have a little
more safety, a little better performance, and a little more room to
grow. What do you think?

Thanks,

-- 
Hamlet D'Arcy
ham...@gm...