Older blog entries for lukeg (starting at number 32)

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.
20 Aug 2004 (updated 21 Aug 2004 at 00:01 UTC) »
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! :-)
Example 8
---------
 
"C" provides a conditional expression.
Thus if "a" and "b" are integer vari-
ables,
 
        (a > b ? a : b)
 
is an expression whose value is that of
the larger of "a" and "b".
 
 
However this does not work if "a" and
"b" are to be regarded as unsigned 
integers. Hence there is a use for the
procedure
 
6326 max (a, b)
     char *a, *b;
     {
       if (a > b)
         return(a);
       return(b);
     }
 
The trick here is that "a" and "b",
having been declared as pointers to
characters are treated for comparison
purposes as unsigned integers.

I just saw in the paper that Christiania, the big hippie commune and soft-drugs haven in the middle of Copenhagen, was just raided by a hundred police. They put a lot of people in jail for a long time.

The world is less of a cool place now.

17 Aug 2003 (updated 17 Aug 2003 at 18:21 UTC) »
re: Clear and informative error messages

raph: CMU Common Lisp is a system that takes error-reportage with macro-expansion seriously.

In the case of compile-time errors in the results of macro expansion, CMUCL's error reportage gives some very useful information: the actual source expression that expands to erroneous code, some context to say which part of the expansion is in error, and an easy way to see how particular expressions get expanded (macroexpand-1) so that your eyeball can spot the error.

For errors occuring during macro-expansion, you get full source-level debugging, since the macro is a Lisp program.

Now I'm curious about how well it works for debugging runtime errors in macro-expanded code. I mustn't have done much of that.

Another more upbeat observation is how good programs like strace and ethereal are, and the fact that you can understand a lot about a program by looking at how it interacts with other programs. Is this what they call "stratified design"?

2 Aug 2003 (updated 2 Aug 2003 at 20:19 UTC) »

Today I wrote a small ethernet switch using my Lisp networking code. A ways back I broke it into separate "low-level networking library" and "partial TCP/IP stack" pieces, which makes it easier to write other applications like this switch. It's surprising how many useful throw-away applications have popped up at work recently when testing our latest network appliance.

I also added support for PF_PACKET sockets in addition to TAP interfaces. PF_PACKET sockets are better for switchey things because they directly access existing interfaces.

The switch is a toy, but I like it because it works and it fits on one screen. (Your screen mileage may vary.)

Here's the code:

;;; switch.lisp -- a toy ethernet switch built on `netlib'.
;;; (netlib source is at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/slitch/)
 
(defpackage :switch
  (:use :common-lisp :netlib)
  (:export :start))
 
(in-package :switch)
 
(defvar *ports* nil
  "Array of switch ports (network devices).")
 
(defvar *fdb* (make-hash-table :test #'equalp)
  "Forwarding database: maps MAC address onto port number.")
 
(defun start (&rest devices)
  "Start switching packets between DEVICES."
  (setq *ports* (concatenate 'vector devices))
  (loop for device across *ports*
        for port from 0
        do (init-port device port)))
 
(defun init-port (device port)
  "Initialize DEVICE as an input port (number PORT)."
  (netdev-enable device
                 ;; This function is called when a frame arrives.
                 ;; FRAME is an ethernet frame as an array of bytes.
                 (lambda (frame) (input frame port))))
 
(defun input (frame input-port)
  "Process a FRAME arriving on INPUT-PORT."
  (multiple-value-bind (source destination) (header-addresses frame)
    (update-fdb source input-port)
    (let ((output-port (where-is destination)))
      (cond ((null output-port)
             (flood frame input-port))
            ((/= output-port input-port)
             (send frame output-port))))))
 
(defun header-addresses (frame)
  "Return the source and destination addresses from FRAME's ethernet header."
  (with-input-from-frame (stream frame)
    (let ((header (read-ethh stream)))
      (values (ethh-src header) (ethh-dest header)))))
 
(defun update-fdb (address port)
  "Update the forwarding database: ADDRESS is on PORT."
  (unless (ethernet-multicast-p address)
    (setf (gethash address *fdb*) port)))
 
(defun where-is (address)
  "Return the port that ADDRESS is on, or NIL if unknown."
  (gethash address *fdb*))
 
(defun send (frame output-port)
  "Send FRAME to OUTPUT-PORT."
  (netdev-tx (aref *ports* output-port) frame))
 
(defun flood (frame input-port)
  "Send FRAME to all ports except INPUT-PORT."
  (dotimes (output-port (length *ports*))
    (unless (= output-port input-port)
      (send frame output-port))))
 
31 Jul 2003 (updated 31 Jul 2003 at 11:10 UTC) »

I've had performance problems with garbage collection before, but this profiler output gave me a great giggle:

  00000030 6173     2.26089     ipt_do_table_Rsmp_b731682a /lib/modules/2.4.18-26.7.xcustom/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_tables.o
  c01dc450 11798    4.32107     rt_intern_hash          /logs/vmlinux
  00000000 25777    9.44095     (no symbol)             /isd/isdwss/erts-5.2.b1.oprofile/bin/beam
  c01ddfa0 40883    14.9736     ip_route_input          /logs/vmlinux
  c01d0a60 109002   39.9225     neigh_forced_gc         /logs/vmlinux

Time for a generational collector in Linux? :-)

And I must say, oprofile is an unbelievably cool tool. Who says systems software research is irrelevant?

(P.S., that GC expense is provoked by a flood of IP packets with random source addresses.)

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