This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Hodel. Original Post: Chasing "undefined method for Fixnum" Feed Title: Segment7 Feed URL: http://blog.segment7.net/articles.rss Feed Description: Posts about and around Ruby, MetaRuby, ruby2c, ZenTest and work at The Robot Co-op. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Hodel Latest Posts From Segment7

I’ve been running the unit tests for 43 People on my Powerbook since the shared development box slowed to a crawl after importing the entire production database and I’m now seeing the “undefined method [blah] for -517611318:Fixnum” message occasionally on my Powerbook. Not content to suffer through running another thirty seconds of tests I reached into eval.c and added a call to rb_bug() when method_missing is called on the Fixnum -517611318.

Within a couple runs of the tests I ended up with a core, but the NODE * argument to rb_eval() was 0×0 for all calls. This made no sense, that value can’t possibly be 0×0 for every call to rb_eval, the optimization flags must have been getting in the way.

So I rebuilt Ruby with -O0 and haven’t gotten a core since. So one of the optimizations that -O or -O2 makes is screwing up Ruby’s internals. Now I’m trying a -O1 build to see if I can reproduce. If I don’t get any problems with -O1 I’ll try sorting through -O2’s flags until I find the culprit.