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[ANN] Gambit-C v4.2.7 released
by gambit＠iro.umontreal.ca 26 Mai '08

26 Mai '08

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[ANN] Gambit-C v4.2.8 released
by gambit＠iro.umontreal.ca 25 Mai '08

25 Mai '08

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Distributing Gambit Source/compiled C code
by adamsonj＠email.unc.edu 22 Mai '08

22 Mai '08

Dear List, I have a small game project that I'd like to distribute to a wider audience (i.e., people who don't have Gambit-C). I've gotten it to compile fully on my system, but I'd like to make sure someone else can compile it. If I distribute Gambit-compiled C, what do I need to include (gambit.h, _gambc.c?) so that anyone with a C compiler can compile it? I know this would be simple for me to figure out if I knew more about C; I throw myself humbly at your broadly educated feet. Thanks, Joel -- Joel J. Adamson Biostatistician Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit Massachusetts General Hospital Boston, MA 02114 (617) 643-1432 (303) 880-3109 Public key: http://pgp.mit.edu http://www.unc.edu/~adamsonj

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New Gambit wiki
by Marc Feeley 18 Mai '08

18 Mai '08

I have just installed a recent distribution of MediaWiki and PHP, and the reCaptcha extension. In order to do this I had to use a different machine (dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca) and copy all the pages from the old wiki to the new wiki. When a page edit is saved a visual captcha will now appear to make sure the edit has been submitted by a human user. Please let me know if you find broken links, missing information, or other issues. Marc

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Bit rot in benchmarks?
by Bradley Lucier 17 Mai '08

17 Mai '08

Marc: I tried to run the benchmarks yesterday, but whenever I tried to specify -fixflo with one of the other options the compiler complained of a bad location for a macro on line 70 of the source of the benchmark. I couldn't figure out what was happening, sorry. Brad

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Building tcl/tk for Gambit
by Nicholas Walton 17 Mai '08

17 Mai '08

Hi, How, or indeed can I, build and run TCL on Mac OS X Leopard using v4_2_2. A simple make does nothing while the best I have so far is $ make run rm -f tcltk.o* ../../gsc/gsc -:=./../.. -cc-options " -I/usr/X11/include" -ld-options " -lSM -lICE -L/usr/X11/lib -R/usr/X11/lib -ltcl -ltk -lX11" ./ tcltk.scm ../../gsi/gsi tcltk -e '(load "test") (main)' ((##tcltk-exit) ##tcltk-exit-should-terminate?: #f) With no TCL window appearing on the screen and the script hanging oblivious to Ctl-C. I have run with both X Windows running and without. Also can I run Gambit with TCL on Windows? Nick Walton

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Making Gambit on the DS Live again.
by jonnay＠jonnay.net 14 Mai '08

14 Mai '08

Hi List I've been trying to hack at Andrew Lentvorski's DS port of gambit, and update it. If you are interested in looking at what has been done, you can grab the latest code from subversion: http://bunny.jonnay.net/gambitnds/trunk/ For this to be brought back into the Gambit Scheme mainline branch, all my hackity-hacks around the makefile need to be properly added to the configure, and it needs to be updated to the main 4.2 branch. The readme file follows: This is a hackjob. It's sad but true. Well, my part in this is a hackjob at any rate. This project needs more then a few things done to really gain steam and kick ass: 1 - Better scheme<->libnds hooks This just takes time. 2 - A much easier way to build a full DS application strictly from within scheme, without the need of a glue c file Right now you need a very heafty C file to get everything working. check gsi/arm9/source/main.c for an example. The functions and definitions here need to move etiher A) into a scm file that can be included, or B) into the libgambc library itself. 3 - A way to build the libgambc.a without resorting to manually hacking the makefiles, hopefully just using configure I don't know enough about configure/autoconf/automake to even start... 4 - Update to gambit 4.2 5 - A much smaller libgambc if possible Currently, I am working on 1 and 2. Bootstrapping: -------------- - Install a VIRGIN gambitc v 4.20b, make and make install on your system. That should give you a 40b22 directory in /usr/local/Gambit-C. This is important, you need a working gambit toolchain and library for your development machine, as well as your target machine. - Install devkitpro - Might as well install PAlib as well. This step is not strictly needed. - Once you've done that, you can start building this version. Don't worry about the --prefix. The make file won't actually get far enough to the install process. :P - Try running "make" in the lib directory. If you get a libgambc.a when you're done, then you're cooking with gas. - I added a new target as well called "install-lib", it strips the libgambc library, and moves it to the devkitpro libnds dir. Its kinds dumb, and you will have to at the very least change the location of the strip executable. (likely more.) Either change this thing, or run strip and copy it manually. - If you didn't get a working libgambc, here are the steps I did to make a working version go. - There is a shell script called myBuild.sh. It sets important environment variables, and runs configure in almost just the right way to get a working libgambc. Edit it to set the path to devkitpro. - Edit the makefile in lib, and make sure the following thigns are set: FLAGS_OBJ = -DNDS -std=gnu99 -DUSE_DSWIFI -Wall -W -Wno-unused -Os -fno-math-errno -fschedule-insns2 -fno-trapping-math -fno-strict-aliasing -fwrapv -fexpensive-optimizations -fforce-addr -fpeephole2 -falign-jumps -falign-functions -fno-function-cse -ftree-copyrename -ftree-fre -ftree-dce -fregmove -fgcse-las -freorder-functions -fcaller-saves -fno-if-conversion2 -foptimize-sibling-calls -fcse-skip-blocks -funit-at-a-time -finline-functions -fmodulo-sched -freschedule-modulo-scheduled-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -fno-common FLAGS_DYN = -specs=ds_arm7.specs -Wall -W -Wno-unused -Os -fno-math-errno -fschedule-insns2 -fno-trapping-math -fno-strict-aliasing -fwrapv -fexpensive-optimizations -fforce-addr -fpeephole2 -falign-jumps -falign-functions -fno-function-cse -ftree-copyrename -ftree-fre -ftree-dce -fregmove -fgcse-las -freorder-functions -fcaller-saves -fno-if-conversion2 -foptimize-sibling-calls -fcse-skip-blocks -funit-at-a-time -finline-functions -fmodulo-sched -freschedule-modulo-scheduled-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -fno-common -rdynamic DEFS = -DHAVE_CONFIG -D___DEBUG LIBS = -lm -lc -lsysbase - I had to add os_tcp, os_debug files to the following vars: NORMAL_C NORMAL H NORMAL O NORMALO_PLUS NORMAL_O_COMMA MODULES_O_IN_COMPILE_ORDER - Finally I had to manually add targets for os_tcp and os_debug - Luckily all this is done for you in the makefile, so worse come to worse, just do a diff if you managed to whack everything. - I added a new target as well called "install-lib", it strips the libgambc library, and moves it to the devkitpro libnds dir. Its kinds dumb, and you will have to at the very least change the location of the strip executable. (likely more.) - Now you can make. You might have to copy the gsc executable from your virgin gambit-dir/gsc to the gsc directory here Working with libgambc: ---------------------- Check out the gsi project. The original is also bundled with this project, but I wanted to update it with the more recent version of devkitpro. This project actually compiles, and almost-executes. It seems to get far, but not far enough (and it needs more work). Additionally, look at thee-stack. This is an attempt to make an NDS application with scheme. Standing on the shoulders of giants: ------------------------------------ Marc Feely - King of Gambit. Andrew Lentvorski - This is the man who laid in all the ground work. Any work I did is merely embellishments and hackjobs. Jonathan Arkell jonnay(a)jonnay.net

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I/O Question
by Francisco 02 Mai '08

02 Mai '08

I need to implement a function to read from a port until a certain char is reached, I want it to stop if there is no such char is retrieved from the string. The original intent is to retrieve data from a network connection, but I am testing it with a string for now, why does it fail with a: "*** ERROR IN ##thread-deadlock-action! -- Deadlock detected"? Please find the code below, Regards, Francisco ;; Reads from connection until stop-char appears (define (read-string-until-char connection stop-char) (letrec ((str "") (reader (lambda () (let ((c (read-char connection))) (cond ((or (char=? c stop-char) (eof-object? c)) str) (else (set! str (string-append-char str c)) (reader))))))) (reader) str)) ;; Reads from connection until stop-char appears (define (read-string-until-char connection stop-char) (letrec ((str "") (reader (lambda () (let ((c (read-char connection))) (cond ((or (char=? c stop-char) ;it never stops here!! (eof-object? c)) str) (else (set! str (string-append-char str c)) (reader))))))) (reader) str)) ;; Appends a char to a string (define (string-append-char str c) (let* ((expanded-str (string-append str " ")) (position (string-length str))) (string-set! expanded-str position c) expanded-str)) (define (with-string-stop str c) (let ((port (open-string str))) (read-string-until-char port c))) (display (with-string-stop "123456" #\5)) (display (with-string-stop "123456" #\7))

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What are your experiences of Termite?
by Mikael More 01 Mai '08

01 Mai '08

Hi! I'm interested in hearing what uses you and others have had of termite, in production as well as experimentally. What is your general experience? Is it mature for production use? If not, then what needs to be improved? If so, what are the areas that would benefit from further development? By what reasons would you or would you not go with Erlang, or any other environment, to fill the same purposes? If any other environment, then what environment? Thanks! Mikael

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Termite & Butterfly Lessons Learned
by D.McClain 30 Avr '08

30 Avr '08

Hi, While our code base for Butterfly is currently proprietary, I thought I would share a few lessons learned from my own re-implementation of Termite. We have had Butterfly successfully running and spawning remote threads and performing "RPC" across our own local area network among 6 different computers, running for hours on end, passing several millions of messages between them, with no problems, save for a few cautionary notes. Our Butterfly images were written in domain specific Lisp, with all compiler dependencies relegated to a single source module of 80 lines of code. Compilers used were Lispworks for Mac and Windows, and Franz Allegro for Windows. We have a port to SBCL about 99% completed, but we got diverted from this activity before fully resolving our mapping to PThreads. 1. We found you do not need 3 full tasks to manage the socket proxy on each end of a network connection. We found that we needed only a reader and writer thread, with the reader in charge of spawning the writer. Out of order message delivery is a must for ease of protocol for the clients. The proxies perform an initial handshake and exchange of local identities so that each proxy can map incoming and outgoing messages between locally known ID's and the correct socket port. 2. The Lisp reader needs to be extended so that composite objects can be interchanged - e.g., service ID's, remote addresses, etc. We used CLOS to represent some of these higher-level objects, and extended our reader using prefix #U to allow for interchange of printable representations of these kinds of objects. 3. Machine image ID's do need to be UUID's for interchange with other computers, or even between separate processes on the same computer. Each running image has its own notion of process ID's that will possibly conflict with those of other processes. The only way to unabmiguously inform each other about PID's is to attach a UUID as part of the identifier. We use simple cardinal integers, symbols, and most often, keyword symbols, for local identifiers. Mapping tables must exist to translate any of these representations to actual process ID's and the thread object representing the running thread and its mailbox queue. 4. Exception processing needs careful supervision. A separate queue is attached to each thread to hold pending exceptions that can be generated by another running thread calling for termination of a sibling thread. When the afflicted thread resumes, it must check this exception queue before accessing normal messages. To avoid imperative and side-effecting notions such as Erlang's use of Flags to represent supervisor tasks that should become safe against the failure of spawned and linked threads, we use an enclosing macro WITH-TRAPPED-EXCEPTIONS to make this more FPL in style. 5. An agent thread is needed at each end of a socket connection to do the bidding of the opposite end. For example, remote spawning requires a remote agent to perform a local spawn. Termite already has that. We extended the duties of the Agent to include remote killing of threads, remote lookup of various ID's, etc. 6. Despite what Erlang would have you believe, it is not always possible to have direct communications between remote threads. It is often the case that they are segregated from each other, e.g., on different sub-nets, or through a serial chain of servers. So direct replies to a RPC request are often impossible. Hence the need for forwarding proxies at each intermediate server location. Our proxy threads are transparent to the applications running on each node. This is made possible by the use of the PID translation table and the proxy substitution PID table mentioned above. 7. Under heavy traffic conditions it is important for the proxy threads to avoid excessive consing, thereby leading to excessive GC cycles. We use local queues of recyclable envelopes (vectors) that can be stuffed by the socket reader and writer threads for use in forwarding. Once these envelopes are no longer needed they are recycled back into the local queue. Our initial tests among all the participating computers used a simple Echo server at the application level. That performed enough consing at each end to cause occasional long pauses in responses. Even though we are on a local area network, with typical average packet Ping response times of around 1-4 ms, we would see as much as 3-5 second pauses while one node or another performs a large GC cycle. So our timeouts had to be adjusted accordingly. But the median RPC response time was actually around 7 ms over several million cycles. I'm sure there are a bunch of other ideas we came up with to solve each problem as it was encountered. On the whole the re-design effort was an enjoyable experience. The net was around 2300 LOC of Lisp after several rounds of refinements and speedup modifications. Of that, only 80 lines need to be examined for adapting to another compiler. We are now in the process of wrapping the communications with SSL to get necessary levels of commercial security. Our lab is one thing -- an environment for scientists -- but the real world can be a nasty place at times. I hope this is helpful... Dr. David McClain Sr. VP, Embedded Systems Asyrmatos Inc. Boston & Tucson phone: 520-529-2437 cell: 520-390-3995 web: www.asyrmatos.com e-mail: dbm(a)asyrmatos.com

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