Re: when GC is permitted Matthew Dempsky 10 Jan 2004 15:40 UTC

Tom Lord <xxxxxx@emf.net> writes:

>    This hypothesis, that you're making a mistake, is reinforced by an
>    experiment that jivera (Matthew Dempsky) carried out.  He thought:
>    "Suppose I have a Scheme implementation that uses a
>    Sperber/Kelsey-style FFI.  And further suppose that I now want that
>    implementation to have a Pika-style FFI.  How hard is that?"  About
>    2-3 pages of trivial code later, and disregarding for the moment
>    the issues we haven't taken up yet about error handling and
>    non-local exits, he had 95% of an implementation.  The only
>    sticking point was on the exact syntax of GCPROtect-family macros:
>    it would take some tweaks to reconcile those in Pika with those in
>    the draft.  We would need to make a trivial addition to the Pika
>    macros to complete the job.

For those interested: http://www.flame.org/~jivera/pika/srfi-50.h

Regarding the current SCM_PROTECT_FRAME macro, even gcc without any
compiler optimization flags is able to use constant folding to reduce
the switch case to just a single function call for common cases of
having a fixed number of local variables.

(I haven't actually worked with S48 or SCSH's FFI so I don't know that
it works -- I wrote it entirely based on what I could understand from
the draft SRFI.)

-jivera