Add: test to ensure correct swapping of the magic number #50
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I am suggesting this test addition as a result of a mistake made by one of my students.
Their implementation went as follows:
The problematic part here is that the student does not fully understand the notion of endianness; they check whether the unswapped or swapped version of the first four bytes equals MAGIC_NUMBER (
0x1deadfad
) to determine whether the file is a valid IJVM binary. This is incorrect: files starting with0xaddfea1d
are not valid IJVM binaries.To address this misconception, I propose a test,
magicnum_swap
, which asserts that initializing an IJVM with a given file that starts with0xaddfea1d
returns NULL (ie. the initialization fails).