Serious bug identified in SmartDashboard/NetworkTables -- robot hangs

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by JamesTerm

Grant it, there is some code out there that cannot be salvaged, but this code doesn't fall into that category as I think is was well thought out... in spite of the nit-picky things I mentioned previously.

Disagree. There are architectural changes that should be made to the code. It's far more complex than what is needed to do the task at hand, and it's very difficult to follow. Because of the complexity, changes that are made are at a higher risk of breaking other things in subtle ways.

Additionally, there is a *lot* a 'bad smelling code' -- stupid things like casting pointers to references and back again (which is related to the author wanting to use 'new' for everything -- which wasn't always necessary), using a union to hold multiple types without any reliable way to determine what is in the union, one byte read/writes to sockets … and this is just the beginning.

Because of these (and other things), most of the code should be scrapped. It will be easier to rewrite the code correctly than to try and fix its problems.