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.