strange method definition overwritten WARNING in tests about sparsearrays.jl

[KristofferC]

My guess is that this has something to do with the (in my opinion) non ideal implementation of disabling getindex.

[rayegun]

It does. I wonder if you know of a better way? IIRC it was based on how CUDA does it

[SobhanMP]

I think there are two other ways to do it, add a global Ref{Bool} can_index state that is checked by those functions, or store it as part of the matrix/type of the matrix.

From a performance perspective, the current implementation is the safest and most compatible; small benchmarks do not convince me that the global state does not hurt performance. And at the end of the day, this is just for debugging, not something anyone should use in production.