Chasing bugs

It’s been over a week, so I thought I’d post a small update. The last few days have been blissfully without Objective-C, xcode and iKITT. I took a little break, as I’m dealing with a consistent crash in the settings screen, and chasing bugs is one of the most tedious things imaginable. I hammer in code at work all day (for things totally unrelated to iKITT) and there comes a time in your life when you’ve had quite enough of it all when you get home. That is the biggest reason everything is taking so long. That, and my unfamiliarity with Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch framework, with which iPhone applications are made.

For, see, I’ve tracked the bug to a problem in memory management, as the app is calling memory that has been de-allocated at some point. That is a lot of technical talk that I usually keep on Twitter. Basically it means that the app is trying to access a part of the program that is no longer there. I’m not used to dealing with problems like this, because these last few years I’ve worked in “garbage collected” languages, where this is not a problem. In garbage-collected languages. In garbage-collected environments, the run-time will automatically keep track of what is in use and “collect” the memory that is not.

So, I will be debugging the code in the coming days, trying to find out where and why things go bang! in the app. This is a good opportunity to get more intimate with xcode’s debugger, breakpoints and exception handling. I hope the next post will have more substance to it and contain the words: “I fixed the memory bug.”