[gambit-list] What are your experiences of Termite?

Christian Jaeger christian at pflanze.mine.nu
Tue Apr 29 23:34:40 EDT 2008


David McClain wrote:
> Hi,
>
> While not a production use of Termite, my recent reading of the  
> sources led me to write our Butterfly system in Common Lisp. My  
> initial attempts at using Termite let to this, as its performance  
> seemed sporadic (more often failing than succeeding -- can't be sure  
> why). But it became increasingly clear that in order to track down the  
> difficulty, I would have to delve deeper into the threading mechanism  
> of Gambit. I'd love to do that someday, but not now.

It would probably be helpful if you could tell more about the kind of 
failures you have seen. The currently released version has a problem 
with generation of uuid's making you run out of memory (they've been 
interned symbols and Gambit doesn't GC those). Guillaume told me that he 
fixed that for the next release.

Other possible problems coming to mind are:

- FFI calls blocking other threads
- the Gambit keyword argument GC bug which has been mentioned on the 
list a few times

BTW I've attached a patch to Termite to make it run on the current 
Gambit release; note that (to be sure it's compiled in safe mode and for 
not having to modify Gambit itself) I'm compiling it like this:

* unpack Termite somewhere else, not inside Gambit tree
* cd termite; patch -p1 < thepatchfile
* cd ..; gsc termite/termite.scm

then run Termite user code with

gsi /path/to/termite/termite path/to/usercode -

Christian.

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