These stack traces are out of control

cstjean · September 26, 2020, 11:46pm

Unfortunately,

Consider deleting custom show methods for types

opened 01:35PM - 22 Apr 20 UTC

closed 04:22AM - 15 Jun 20 UTC

I.e. https://github.com/PainterQubits/Unitful.jl/blob/7fb2dfb68c63c0a77b8c859c29…4d8b7f03f337d6/src/display.jl#L80-L85. There are two reasons for this. The first is that, according to the compiler team, the base methods are not supposed to be overloaded. It's not documented and not obvious but it's been assumed that `show(::IO, ::Type)` isn't overloaded by user code so doing that can lead to very odd issues. E.g. the definitions in this package might have caused Documenter to hang for one of my packages because Documenter prints the signature of methods with missing docs. The second reason is that it can be super confusing when types print differently from what they really are. I've had some issues with that when using this package because I based some function signatures on how the types were printed in the REPL only to get an error because the signature didn't match.

The first reason is that, according to the compiler team, the base methods are not supposed to be overloaded. It’s not documented and not obvious but it’s been assumed that show(::IO, ::Type) isn’t overloaded by user code so doing that can lead to very odd issues. E.g. the definitions in this package might have caused Documenter to hang for one of my packages because Documenter prints the signature of methods with missing docs.