SRFI-18

Sent the final patches in (including the Scheme implementation stuff and the test suite) on the 13th. Hopefully this'll be the last go-round -- well, the last go-round before it's done, you know, as a feature. There're certainly some bugs in there.

SRFI-88

Ludovic just committed a patch I made to Guile's reader a while back that lets you use postfix colons to signify keywords (e.g., foo:), and tacked on a trivial implementation of SRFI-88 that just sets the appropriate `(reader-options)' flag. Not having compatible keyword-parsing was standing in the way of some other cool stuff, notably SRFI-89 (Optional positional and named parameters) and SRFI-90 (Extensible hash table constructor). I'm working on a SRFI-89 implementation now in the form of a conversion layer for Guile's (ice-9 optargs) module.

In other exciting(-ish) news, it looks like Ludovic and Andy Wingo are going to revive Guile-VM, possibly for inclusion in 1.10. Rock!

Cambridge

Who's coming to the FSF Associate Members meeting tomorrow? Come on, Advogatters, let's see a show of hands. (I'll only be staying 'til 4:00, though, 'cuz I have to hop the Acela back to NYC to catch The Pogues!)

SRFI-18

Whee -- the second of the three SRFI-18 patches has just been committed to Guile HEAD. This one was a doozy, and included a bunch of additions to the core threading API. Specifically, the following functions are now available for use: scm_join_thread_timed, scm_thread_p, scm_make_mutex_with_flags, scm_lock_mutex_timed, scm_unlock_mutex_timed, scm_mutex_p, and scm_condition_variable_p. In addition to providing the groundwork for a full Scheme implementation of SRFI-18, I think these functions bring Guile's threading API comparably up to date with most other modern, you know, commodity language platforms.

One of the neat things that came out of this round of discussion and debugging is that, as kind of pointed out by Marc Feeley's SRFI-18 spec, waiting on a condition variable is actually a special case of mutex unlocking.

Next up: The Scheme parts of SRFI-18. This should come fairly quickly, given that it's already written -- and that Scheme's far less brittle than C when it comes to refactoring.

The big blue (server) room

I spent yesterday (Saturday) in the office, helping my boss build a rack for our servers, something neither of us had ever done before. The process involved completely dismantling the network used by our company (and the two other companies we share space with); dismantling the existing rack; building our new rack; hastily purchasing underpowered power tools to drill holes into the hardwood floors to brace the thing; painstakingly hooking everything back up according to the notes I'd taken; having nothing work right; panicking; finally realizing at midnight that there was a bad Ethernet cable between the T1 and the switch; celebrating.

Woke up at 2:00 PM today, still groggy, all the muscles in my back cramped to hell.

SRFI-18

Because this is still novel for me: Neil just committed the first of the trifecta of patches necessary to add SRFI-18 support to Guile. This one includes fixes for a couple of deadlocks related to thread creation and cleanup. We discussed the inclusion of a fix for another deadlock related to waiting a condition variable using an inconsistent set of mutexes, but I think that one's going to have to wait. Next on the docket: The enhancements that provide the C foundation for the pure Scheme SRFI-18 implementation.

Hey-O! It's been a real long time. I got a new job, and now I am busy all the time. Happy New Year, software hippies!

SRFI-18

A lot of work, but not a whole lot of progress on this front. Submitted an implementation, which involved a lot of changes to Guile C and Scheme; Neil Jerram wisely pointed out that it really belonged in several separate patches. What ought to go in each of them has been a subject of discussion on guile-devel for the past month or so. I think we are making some headway -- I will keep the 'gato informed.