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Metadebugging (i.e. founding metabugs) methodology.Hello All (I hope this forum is the appropriate place to ask) I'm working within GCC on a Lisp translator (from some Lisp dialect, called MELT, to C) to be used for GCC middle end analysis; the motivation is to be able to code GCC middle end analyzers & passes in my Lisp dialect. The code is updated several times a day on the GCC SVN. See MELT for details (or ask me). The lisp dialect is not really documented yet. The major difference is that MELT has both boxed and unboxed values. Also, most primitives are not called as in Lisp (but most control operators are the same, let is somehow a let*, ...). Primitives are described by giving their expansion to C. MELT files have a *.bysl extension (because MELT was called Basilys at first). The MELT dialect is a lisp like dialect (a Lisp1 in C.Queinnec terminology), with dynamic types and lexical scoping (a la Scheme). Here is the familiar 2nd order function to map a function into a list. (defun list_map (lis f) (if (is_list lis) (if (is_closure f) (let ( (reslis (make_list discr_list)) (curpair (list_first lis)) ) (forever lisloop (if (not (is_pair curpair)) (return reslis)) (let ( (curelem (pair_head curpair)) ) (list_append reslis (f curelem))) (setq curpair (pair_tail curpair))) ))))
In the code above, Here is the (defprimitive not (:long i) :long "(!(" i "))") (defprimitive is_list (li) :long "(basilys_magic_discr((" li ")) == OBMAG_LIST)") The first The Lists in MELT are not just pairs. A List is actually a structure keeping the first & the last pair of a linked list of pairs. First, some fact about my implementation (available on GCC SubVersion repository in the MELT branch). I'm working within GCC, closely following the trunk (future 4.4) I have a runtime, which means a garbage collector & various primitives coded in C. See files gcc/basilys.c & gcc/basilys.h - it is debugged well enough to be able to run many minutes. (BTW debugging a garbage collector is a nightmare). MELT garbage collector is built above the existing GGC collector in GCC. I have a cold translator, coded in Common Lisp (CLISP actually). File contrib/cold-basilys.lisp. It is able to translate some MELT code *.bysl into *.c ; I do know it is buggy, but I want to maintain it as little as possible. Conceptually the only purpose of this cold translator is to be able to handle warm-basilys.bysl below The real stuff is the warm translator, in file gcc/melt/warm-basilys.bysl it is translated by CLISP running cold-basilys.lisp to coldbuilt-warm-basilys.c & coldbuilt-warm-basilys.so (a plugin dynamically loaded by my cc1 - the C compiler proper of gcc). my cc1 with the above generated coldbuilt-warm-basilys.so is able to translate (except bugs) any *.bysl file into *.c (so it does the same work as cold-basilys.lisp, but in principle better, and coded in MELT). in particular it is able to translate itself, ie warm-basilys.bysl into warm-basilys-1.c etc.. my cc1 with warm-basilys-1.so is able to generate warm-basilys-2.c from the same warm-basilys.bysl. Sadly, warm-basilys-2.c is not the same as warm-basilys-1.c (it should) my cc1 with warm-basilys-2.so produces warm-basilys-3.c from warm-basilys.bysl. warm-basilys-2.c & warm-basilys-3.c are identical (but buggy). The buggy bootstrap (with warm-basilys-2 & warm-basilys-3 identical but buggy) actually happenned in svn rev135845 I am chasing a meta-bug, in the following sense.. The function I am experimenting that chasing metabug is challenging, and quite difficult. Do you have horror stories, hints, insights, theoretical papers, personal experiences, about these? How do you find such metabugs? (it is meta in the sense that the generated code behave wrongly). Regards. By Basile STARYNKEVITCH at 2008-05-28 20:30 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 441439 reads
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