Debugging String Templates

[Behdad Forghani]

Hi,

I posted a blog entry about how I use and debug string templates. I hope you find the post useful. Also, let me know if I have reinvented the wheel and if there is a simpler way of doing this.

http://exapackets.blogspot.com/2015/07/debugging-string-templates.html

Regards,

Behdad Forghani

[Terence Parr]

Cool. have you seen the visual debugger STViz?

Ter

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[Behdad Forghani]

This is a good point. I have used STViz to debug String Templates themselves.

The use case for my blog was to debug the application that is using the templates. To give an idea, the grammar file for my ASN.1 compiler is about 2800 lines of code (this was done in Antlr3, so there was a lot of Java code in the grammar file) and for PML is about 600 lines (Antlr4 with grammar only). There are 1000 lines of String Template code and 13000 lines of Java code because the compiler does a lot of processing and optimizations. The compiler generates C code for the output, and the errors would show in the output C code.

Now, with String Template in the middle, I had to look at the C code, then String Template code which some were similar with subtle differences and finally the starting Java code if the problem was in the Java logic. The time to debug had gone up a lot. By printing the name of the first/parent Template and the line number and class where the template was called, I could zero in on how the information flows.

Also, the writeTemplate made it very easy to call the templates, there was one routine and I would only change the string of the template parameters and its value.

Thanks for making such a fantastic tool.

Regards,

Behdad

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/stringtemplate-discussion/203F612F-FF2E-4742-B14D-8777766D1618%40cs.usfca.edu.

[Terence Parr]

Yeah, I often do things to figure out where in the code a template was created etc… good stuff you have there.

Ter

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