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Re: guile-vm-0.0


Keisuke Nishida <kxn30@po.cwru.edu> writes:

> > Hmm, I'm not sure if I would want to have two evaluators in Guile.
> > Just one should be enough to maintain.  Making the two cooperate might
> > be possible, but not too easy, especially when you consider the two
> > tail-calling each other.
> 
> Such a low-level cooperation is not necessary, but probably it is true
> that my VM will become able to evaluate any expression in time.  In any
> event, I'll depend on your evaluator until my VM becomes completed.

Oh, there's a misunderstanding here.  My tree-code evaluator is only
an experiment.  It is not the evaluator currently in production use.
It is here:

    ftp://krusty.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/people/mvo/new-eval-*

> Debugging support is the concern I have about my VM.  Since
> bytecodes loose information about source code, I'm not sure if I can
> provide a good debugging interface. (Nobody want to trace assemble
> code)

Yes, but as Mikael as suggested, we can provide out-of-band
information to be used by the debugger, like the normal C chain does
it.  For example, we would not store which range of byte-code belongs
to which _line_ of the source code, but rather to which
sub-expression.  The debugger could then do single-stepping on
individual expressions.

Ultimately, the hygienic macro machinery will probably of help to deal
with debugging thru macro expansions by providing hints where the
different parts of such a expansion come from.  The low-level macro
system might have problems with that.

> I think the only thing necessary is a linkage loader.

Yes, technically, there should be little problems.  One might have to
do some work to make byte codes load *really* fast, that is, without
having to look at each byte, and dumping Scheme values to disk needs
to be taken care of as well.

> > Right on!  In fact, this is one big reason, why I consider killing my
> > tree-code evaluator idea: you seem to be a damn good hacker, I can't
> > keep up with you anyway.
> 
> Thanks :)  I believe I am potentially a good hacker, but I need more
> experience.

Speak softly and carry a two-sided brain, or something like that... ;-)

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