[Ecls-list] ECL support for cl-launch and xcvb

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 8:58 PM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> With 9.6.1, I run until test 174 where it tries to from a previously
> dumped image, and si:getenv always returns NIL (possibly using the
> environ pointer from previous run?).

ECL does not dump images. As such, there is no way that si:getenv
returns the environment from a previous session. If you get NIL then
the environment variable is not defined or there is something wrong
going on with the POSIX function to retrieve the environment variables

> With 9.10.2, I fail at test 73 when I first try to dump an image and
> resume from it. Apparently, the primitive (si:quit 0) fails miserably,

Yes, this was fixed partly yesterday night and partly today.

> cl-launch has a love-hate relationship with ECL. ECL was the first
> implementation for which I could produce reliable standalone
> executables. But it is also an implementation where weird things
> happen, and features are randomly broken from one revision to the
> next.

There is probabaly a fundamental difference between ECL and other
implementations. Namely, the low level details are still moving. From
the release you were most happy with till today we had to add support
for five new platforms and chipsets, and this involves changing also
the way things work at the C level.

So it is not that I personally struggle to break things at random
places, but the fact is that random things have to be changed because
now this ARM compiler does not like floating point exceptions, that
Sun compiler has only partial support for that feature, etc. Your
library, cl-launch, is also dealing with pretty sensitive stuff --
executable building -- and thus it is more likely that you hit those
rough spots.

> I'd like to support it in cl-launch and xcvb, but I am currently at
> loss at what approach to use to debug such issues.

Faré, you say that you found a problem with 9.8. That is three months
ago, but I have not read ANY email from you reporting that here. If
you do not report problems, how am I supposed to find them out? Pester
us with ANY SINGLE PROBLEM you find with cl-launch and me or somebody
else contributing here may help in solving it.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com