A while back I mentioned how easy it was to set up the Goldenseal Pro outline view. It replaces the menus at the top, and does an excellent job of organizing things. I assumed that NSOutlineView probably was so reliable because it also runs the Macintosh Finder.
Unfortunately, I spoke too soon about that. This week we opened a few items, and the outline view stopped working. Clicking did nothing.
Usually our staff is very methodical. We add new code, make sure it works, and then commit it to the source control system. Nearly always, the process works well. Stuff improves, step by step. Unfortunately, a few times a year we miss something subtle, or change something with unintended consequences. It becomes a bug that rears its head weeks or months later. This is one of those times.
The first thing we did was check the weekly full-project backups, to see when it broke. Recent backups also had the problem. The June 2 backup worked OK. The June 9 backup didn’t. Most of the changes that week were related to bank transactions, and unlikely to affect the outline view. That week we did add a new NSSplitView to make the window resizable. So we removed that, but it didn’t help.
Next step was to rebuild from source control, to narrow it down to a shorter time range. June 7 was OK. June 8 wasn’t. Most of the changes that day were just accounting stuff, but we also started to add “weak” references. It’s an Apple thing that prevents memory leaks. That seemed like the smoking gun.
To test it, we set some breakpoints. Sure enough, the outline table was deleted randomly, after running a while. In earlier builds it stuck around. It didn’t work because it wasn’t there.
Apples ARC (automatic reference counting) is hard to debug. In C++ you can set a breakpoint right where an object is deleted, to see what killed it. Objective-C with ARC does the deletion some random time later. That makes it very difficult to find the cause of death.
Our staff spent a couple days stepping through code and reading more about ARC. It’s more complicated than we first thought. One website describes ARC as “kind of like a Japanese B-horror movie”. That seems accurate. We spent several weeks in April and May, struggling with a similar problem in the tab view.
Today we got too frustrated, and gave up for a while. It’s time to get back to more productive programming.
The Apple developer list is often helpful for odd problems, so we just posted a message there. This is the kind of enigma that may be solved in a dream at 3 AM, days or weeks later. Worst case, we get one support incident with Apple per year. It may be time to use it.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
