[armedbear-devel] [rfc] Preventing stack inconsistencies - structurally

[Alan Ruttenberg]

a) I don't know internals well enough to decipher the proposal. Is
allocation on the stack a performance optimization? If so has any
metering been done to see whether it actually impacts performance? If
you would like opinions from me and perhaps others perhaps you could
say a few more words about what the safety issue is? When is the JVM
stack cleared?

b) If you are going to be doing thinking about compiler architecture I
would very much like to see some thought going into debuggability. My
current impression is that the trend is downward with more and more
cases of not even being able to see function call arguments in slime.
For example, at this point in ABCL's development, I think having a
compiler option that pays performance for the ability to view local
variables in the debugger should be an increasing priority. Other's
mileage may vary, but in my case, where the bulk of time is spent in
java libraries of various sorts, improving lisp performance is a
distinctly lower priority than improving developer productivity by
making it easier to debug.

2¢,
Alan