[Vm-dev] Push/pop considered harmful

[Eliot Miranda]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 7:09 AM, John M McIntosh <
johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:

>
> Do you think we could change Slang so that it wouldn't return anything if
> the procedure returns nothing? Thus avoid all these sqInt foo() {}
>  **warning does not return value messages


Already done.  I have a slew of Slang changes that will get released with
Cog.  I'll try and write-up a list sometime soon.



> - Show quoted text -
>
>
> On 2-Mar-09, at 11:24 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
>
>  Folks -
>>
>> Ever since we started to use the Stack VM we had a series of subtle
>> crashes, many of which we could trace to stack imbalances (i.e., mismatching
>> numbers of push/pops in primitives). Since the Stack VM is much more
>> affected by this we have been looking to fix these issues once and for all.
>>
>> One thing that occurred to us is that practically all primitives do the
>> same: They pop the number of arguments and they push an optional return
>> value. There are many ways in which this can get wrong, sometimes it's a
>> subtle early return, sometimes the fact that the primitive has actually
>> failed before the prim returns etc.
>>
>> One thing that all of the uses (in plugins) have in common that all the
>> plugin *really* needs to do, is to provide a return value and leave the
>> push/pop to be done by the VM. In this case the stack invariants wouldn't
>> even be exposed to the plugin.
>>
>> What we are doing right now is along those lines - basically we are
>> replacing push/pop in the interpreter proxy by variants that don't actually
>> do push and pop. Rather than that, pop is ignored (it only remembers how
>> many times you popped so we can track inconsistencies) and push remembers
>> the return value.
>>
>> This should definitely be replaced at some point by a proper
>> #primitiveReturnValue: call. I was wondering what people think about the
>> possibility of automatically rewriting plugins to fix those uses? It should
>> be reasonably easy to find all the uses of "interpreterProxy pop: foo" and
>> just remove them and replace "interpreterProxy push[Float|Int]:" with
>> "interpreterProxy primitiveReturn[Float|Int]:".
>>
>> Cheers,
>>  - Andreas
>>
>
> --
> ===========================================================================
> John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
> ===========================================================================
>
>
>
>
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