Thursday, December 16, 2004

Clever IDEA

I just noticed very clever behavior by IntelliJ IDEA 4.5.3 on Windows. I ran a junit test that crashed the test JVM from badly behaved JNI code. Unfortunately, this caused the JVM for IDEA itself to eventually exhaust memory and crash. IDEA handled this well, informed me of the problem, and gracefully shutdown.

The cool part: when I launched it again, it ran the console window for the LAX launch wrapper. Normally this does not appear so that you just have the main application window, but the console emits all sorts of interesting information useful to someone developing IDEA. Presumably, had the crash I mentioned been IDEA's fault, I could use that information to help IntelliJ fix the bug.

Further, I closed IDEA normally and relaunched it. This time it come up normally with no extra console window. The console window feature is only triggered by a crash in IDEA. Nifty!

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