[Vm-dev] Building OSProcessPlugin on macs

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Thu Jul 7 03:36:51 UTC 2011


On 7 July 2011 05:28, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 06:38:10PM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > With a new version of plugin submitted by Eliot it no longer crashing :)
>> >
>>
>> Slang is occasionally super-tricky.  If you write
>>
>>     self atexit: #sendSignalToPids
>>
>> it generates
>>
>>     atexit("sendSignalToPids")
>>
>> which will crash.  You must write
>>
>>     self atexit: #sendSignalToPids asSymbol
>>
>> to get it to generate
>>
>>     atexit(sendSignalToPids)
>>
>> (where sendSignalToPids is some function to be called at exit).
>>
>> If course we should change this but there's backwards-compatibility for
>> plugin to consider.  Does anyone depend on the old behavior?  I've been
>> bitten more than a few times by this.  Sigh...
>
> Symbols and strings are used more or less interchangably in C translation
> (aka "slang") and in pragmas. So I think that there is a general expectation
> that either a symbol or a string would translate to C as a string. In
> the case of #sendSignalToPids, this is actually a function pointer that
> is being used in a rather specialized context. So even though the
> translation of 'self atexit: #sendSignalToPids' produces a surprising
> result in this case, I would still say that is reasonable to expect
> Smalltalk symbols and strings to both translate into C strings, and
> it would not be reasonable to expect a simple C translator to do
> enough type checking to figure out that in this particular case the
> '#sendSignalToPids' should be treated as a function pointer rather
> than as a string.
>

I concur not. As to me a least surprising behaviour for code generator
would be to covert symbols to
identifiers with same name, instead of literal strings.


> The original method in UnixOSProcessPlugin is written as follows in
> order to avoid this issue:
>
>        self cCode: 'atexit(sendSignalToPids)'.
>

the problem with above code that it doesn't tells code generator to
keep sendSignalToPids method around,
instead of pruning it since nobody using it.
That's why in hydra i added this special asCIdentifier to not only
convert symbol to identifier (instead of quoted C string)
but also make sure that if given symbol matching the method name ,
then make sure that this method won't be pruned.

And of course , when browsing the code i can see senders of it, while
if i forced to use cCode: 'yaddayadda',
it will hide the usage from our eyes.

So, one way or another, but the less cCode: we have, the better.

> I also note that the purpose of SlangBrowser is to make it easy to
> review code like this while it is being written, so I guess that I
> should get off my butt and get this working in the oscog branch one
> of these days :-/
>
> Dave
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.


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