RE: [Gcl-devel] trying to finalize the windows issues ...

[Mike Thomas]

Hi there.

Per Camm's earlier suggestion:

| | 2) more than 65k C stack, -> 8mb)  re: the maxima
| | ignore-errors issue with --enable-debug and let me know what the
| | status is?
|
| This is an interesting suggestion which showed up weaknesses in
| the Windows NULL_OR_ON_C_STACK system (see below).  So far I have
| only matched the test to the default 2Mb stack.  Perhaps raising
| the stack to 8Mb will help?  Can't get to it today unfortunately.

Some progress to report with an 8M C stack:

On a --enable-debug build using gcc 3.3.1 and friends and with an 8M stack
hack the Maxima ignore-errors bug did not manifest and a HEAD branch random
tester (from a couple of weeks ago) ran for 1000 iterations.

Building without --enable-debug led to the same result on Maxima, but I
foolishly  updated the HEAD random tester before running in optimised mode
only to discover that it no longer compiles with 2.6.1 GCL due to:

==========================================================================
gcc: --stack=8388608: linker input file unused because linking not done
OPTIMIZE levels: Safety=3, Space=0, Speed=3
Finished compiling ansi-aux.lsp.
Loading ansi-aux.o
Error in PCL::LOAD-DEFMETHOD [or a callee]: No class named: RANDOM-STATE.
==========================================================================

However, reverting to version 1.95 of that file avoided that problem.
Unfortunately the optimised compile crash in universe.lsp is still there:

==========================================================================
OPTIMIZE levels: Safety=3, Space=0, Speed=3
Finished compiling ansi-aux-macros.lsp.
Loading ansi-aux-macros.o
start address -T 107f0680 Finished loading ansi-aux-macros.o
Loading universe.lsp

Unrecoverable error: Segmentation violation..

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual
way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
make: *** [mike-test] Error 3
==========================================================================

I am proceeding to try with gcc 3.4.0 to see whether the optimised randowm
tester compiler failure goes away.

Either way with minor mods to the Windows stack via the compiler options I
am hoping Camm's new 2.6.2 will at least cover the main test bases if built
using --enable-debug.

I'm wary as I don't understand how a short C stack would have caused the
ignore-errors path handling failure - the test passes may just be good luck.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.