[Gcl-devel] Re: dynamic-extent make-list initialization error?

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

Robert Boyer <address@hidden> writes:

> > BTW are we done on the after gbc hook?
> 
> Yes, as far as I can tell.  Thanks very much.
> 
> I have mostly given up on the big-array with forged conses to hash consing
> approach because I realized that I was simply stupid.  GCL's GC does not
> trace pointers from the stack into fixnum arrays, and quite reasonably so.
> That was why some things were not getting marked.
> 
> Yesterday, we tried a new hack of putting the big hons array on the stack,
> using stack conses, and that worked remarkably well.  Even with a make-list
> 100000000!  An advantage of that is that it is putting the honses above the
> 2gb mark, leaving space below for other Lisp objects!  Alas, this approach
> suffers from the fact that no one is gc'ing the honses automatically, so we
> have to periodically wipe them all out, as we were doing doing with the
> older, strictly ANSI-conforming (no si::nani or si::address), approach to
> hons.
> 

Wow, so I guess you must be providing your own toplevel to avoid
popping the stack above your hons allocation.  Great!  

> I'm still happily using the *after-gbc-hook* hack to implement a sort of
> "weak alist", that maps conses to possibly big hash tables.  If the GC marks
> the conses as free, I can let the hash tables go.
> 

Is this solid enough that I can now omit the older calling pattern in
the alloc functions now commented out?  Have you encountered any other
anomalies since that recursive GBC fix?

Take care,

> Thanks so very much,
> 
> Bob
> 
> P. S.  I'll check out the make-list initialization fix right now.
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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