CFER : "suitable for blogs"

ICFP 2009 has a "Call For Experience Reports", and specifically mentions that its suitable for posting on blogs.

So here goes. :)

ICFP 2009: CFER

data structures, network outages, and php

The most "productive" portion of my day was spent prototyping the interface to summary set matrix that I will be putting into the regional collector RSN. I have the header file worked out and started working on the representation itself. I got part way through writing a constructor function before deciding that I wanted to think a bit more about how I want to handle allocation and deallocation of the entries in the sparse matrix.

(Some of that time was spent reviewing the existing source for the Larceny runtime, especially the different attribute bits one can put on pages of memory in Larceny, and the history of when they were introduced and/or shifted around by Lars...)

I also had a back-and-forth with the Systems staff since artichoke and poblano became inaccessible from the outside world at some point yesterday evening.

I finished off the day trying to figure out why my GC benchmarking script is still failing on the dynregion/ branch. I have more of a clue about it now, but am pretty unhappy about how much of a kludge this supposedly simpler script is becoming. (Maybe I should give up doing these things in shell script and just do them as Larceny scripts.)

hi after hiatus

This weekend I mentioned that I had a blog to my family, and then showed the url to Stephanie.

I proceeded to become engrossed in reading over my old posts; I had forgotten some of the interesting software experiments I had been posting online.

Of course, I have not made a post in almost two years. I have since switched to keeping an internal work diary, so that I would not worry about giving away the farm (or embarrassing outcomes of my day to day research), and also posting any interesting links that I wanted to see later to my del.icio.us account

But I realized after looking at the old entries that I liked broadcasting my progress.

So I am going to try to maintain this blog again, and see if I can figure out how to distill my daily work diary into something small (and publicly distributable) each day (or perhaps every other day or so... who knows).

So, today:

• Rasputin's disk was full; I had to wrestle with that for a little while. It seems like each disk fills up on such a regular basis that I really should consider fixing the autobuild scripts to clean up after themselves or to compress their generated directories or both...


• I finally checked in a fix to Larceny's simplistic stopcopy collector on the IAssassin backend so that when allocation fills up a chunk in a semispace, the runtime first attempts to switch the allocation pointer to a free chunk within the semispace rather than attempt a whole heap collection. This is a crucial fix, because the stopcopy collector's performance had asymptotically terrible performance before, which affected both our benchmark results and some of our users who wanted to load a lot of code before performing a heap dump.


• I spent some time trying to double-check the runtime source code's make dependencies, because I thought I saw evidence that not everything was being rebuilt properly in response to changes I made for fixing the stopcopy collector. Unfortunately I was unable to pin down any particular missing dependency.


• I tried generalizing the nightly GC benchmarking script so that it could also benchmark my dynregion development branch. But then my attempts to just double-check the behavior of the GC benchmarking script itself failed, and my investigations there led me to file Ticket #547 in Larceny's trac database.

I also spent some time browsing the web/google groups/etc. I added some links to my aforementioned del.icio.us account. I don't think I'll be explicitly mentioning such activity on my part in the future.