I've moved over to a new high-tech weblog of my own now!
Update:That was not quite high-tech enough so I made a new one instead.

EUC'04

I went to the 10th annual Erlang conference on thursday and had a great time, as usual.

My favourite talk was about the Dialyzer (Discrepancy Analyzer). This program analyzes regular Erlang object-code to find discrepancies that suggest programming errors. The analysis seems very much like what CMUCL does: infer type information from the way variables are used, propagate it around, then warn about any contradictions. Very impressive that it runs on unmodified object code, appears to really find bugs, and has managed to consume a 1.1 million line Erlang program without exploding. These guys have done an exceptional job of designing their tool to actually appeal to working Erlang programmers. (So far it hasn't found as many bugs as I'd expected, but I'm not sure if that's good or bad.)

I also saw a really amazing demo of Virtutech's Simics product, which is only related to Erlang in that one of the HiPE guys has joined them. It's much like Bochs or QEMU but it emulates a wide range of machines: x86, AMD64, SunFire/sparc, Alpha, and so on. It has some extra-fancy features like the ability to run the machine in simulated time, so that when the kernel enters the idle-loop it "fast forwards" to the next event. Really amazing, but unfortunately it isn't free software and I gather it's priced only for large corporations.

And of course free beer at the post-conference ErLounge didn't go astray. Hurray for the Erlang companies who sponsored the event :-)

XML

I'm currently implementing a protocol based on XML Schema and SOAP. As good as it was to spend five-odd years in blissful ignorance of XML, now I do wish that I'd started using it before XML-bashing became passé.

apenwarr: I think a really interesting case that's somewhat related to your Scripting Languages and Reliability question is Emacs Lisp. The standard Emacs distribution today includes about one million lines of Emacs Lisp, and though the language lacks basic features like a module system it's still comfortable to program with, even in such a large system. This amazes me.

Onward!

I'm not luke@bluetail.com anymore, but I'm still @member.fsf.org.

ncm: Hi! I just noticed that you work at ITA Software. I have a question that you might be able to help me with, about this part of the article on paulgraham.com:

9. We can do 10 seconds of Lisp computation on a 800mhz box and cons less than 5k of data. This is because we pre-allocate all data structures we need and die on queries that exceed them. This may make many Lisp programmers cringe, but with a 250 meg image and real-time constraints, we can't afford to generate garbage. For example, rather than using cons, we use "cons!", which grabs cells from an array of 10,000,000 cells we've preallocated and which gets reset every query.

I don't understand the CONS! bit. Doesn't this have the same performance characteristics as using a generation-scavenging collector with a 10MB nursery, forcing a GC between requests ("for free" because the nursery is pure garbage), and aborting if a GC is triggered before the request ends? Why don't you do it that way?

Surreal

<tibo> Luke, you won't believe it, your photo is in a newspaper today, here in
       Portugal
<tibo> It is the picture that appears on your web page (assuming it is you).
<tibo> I'm serious !
<tibo> Well it not a very serious newspaper... The 10 lines "news" is about a
       "study" that concludes that 17% Germans adults "drink in order to
       become drunk"
<tibo> I will try to scan it.

The price of fame! :-)