Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] interpreted runtime broken

[Matt Birkholz]

> From: Taylor R Campbell <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2013 04:43:23 +0000
> 
>    Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 09:47:44 -0700
>    From: Joe Marshall <address@hidden>
> 
>    We should have a new release so this isn't a problem.
> 
> Another approach would be to write a portable fasdump so that we can
> begin to fix the source of the problem rather than keep working around
> it release by release.

Given that we release ~5 times a decade, working around it release by
release sounds like the cheaper alternate.

We recently (4 years ago) had a problem with a new star-parser
operator that was used in the runtime system before it was released.
Such circularities happen when fooling with a circular system (that
compiles itself).  We must "train" the system, as ken put it in his
Turing Award Lecture.  We break the circularities by releasing (a
product of) a trained system.

A fasdump/fasload that accommodates added and deleted primitives,
s-code types, whatnot, will surely help, but its absence is not "THE
source of the problem".

We should have a new release so this isn't a problem, sooner.