[Vm-dev] Re: Cog VM continuous integration: update

[Yanni Chiu]

On 01/07/11 8:54 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>
> The next step is to run tests for built VMs. For this i planning to
> create a specialized package, which will contain code snippets for
> loading&  firing off various tests,
> because currently all tests are a bunch of .st scripts, and managing
> files over dozen of networked machines is not fun.
> So, i think i will just take these snippets and put them into single
> MC package, so then it could be managed much easier.

Building VM's on CI server is a great step forward. Thanks for making it 
happen.

I'm curious about how to test each build. For a C compiler, typically a 
fixed-point is done - i.e. compile the new compiler (yielding stage1 
compiler), then use the stage1 compiler to compile the new compiler 
again (yielding stage2 compiler). Repeat to get stage3 compiler. The 
stage2 and stage3 compiler binaries are supposed to be identical. Then, 
in a C/UNIX system, recompiling the OS and tools was a good test suite.

There may be some equivalent thing to do for a JIT/VM + image, but I 
can't figure out what it is. Maybe all the method dictionaries need to 
be written out in canonical order, then the stage2 and stage3 results 
compared. But, that would only test the compiler, not the JIT 
functionality. Anyways, just some random thoughts...