notImplemented() is too subtle

• Component: New Bugs
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Jeremy Orlow]

I was just debugging a problem and found out that notImplemented() was being called but I had never noticed.  I looked at the source code, and this is all it does:

#define notImplemented() do { \
        static bool havePrinted = false; \
        if (!havePrinted && !supressNotImplementedWarning()) { \
            WTFLogVerbose(__FILE__, __LINE__, WTF_PRETTY_FUNCTION, &::WebCore::LogNotYetImplemented, "UNIMPLEMENTED: "); \
            havePrinted = true; \
        } \
    } while (0)

I'm wondering why this doesn't do something more obvious.  Isn't hitting not-implemented code kind of a big deal?  Shouldn't we do an assert so that someone who's debugging sees it?

If we want to fix this, feel free to assign to me and I can take care of it.

[Sam Weinig]

I don't think we want to change this.  notImplemented is helpful for bringing up a port, and asserting all over the place would not be useful in those circumstances.

[Jeremy Orlow]

We could make the behavior port specific.  When ports are mature, they can opt-into it being an assert.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

My understanding is that even ports that are quite mature still hit notImplemented() fairly often - in particular, on notification calls for Web Inspector and such.