Periodic reports: multithreading & tests
Written by jjgarcia on 2012-05
Probably nobody cares about this, but there has been some activity in ECL in various fronts. I periodically report that to the ECL mailing list, but this seems to lead other people to think the project is silent or dead. From now on, expect a little bit more noise through the ECL news RSS.
The biggest change ECL will suffer with the upcoming release is the multithreading library. So far we were relying on the POSIX primitives for that (pthread_mutex_lock, condition variables, etc), but this has proven to be a nightmare to maintain. The primitives are not interruptible and they do not interact well with mp:process-interrupt, a feature unfortunately everybody expects in a Lisp implementation.
The upcoming library will be based on a combination of hardware-coded atomic operations (via libatomic-ops) with a new waiting queue that makes clever use of the operating system facilities. The result should be a library that is fair (different threads have equal opportunities), it recognizes fast paths (when a synchronization object is free it is quickly acquired), and in the worst case it is not CPU consuming (relies on sigsuspend or SleepEx to really sleep a waiting thread).
Everything is right now in git/CVS (http://ecls.sourceforge.net/download.html) and under heavy testing with new dedicated tests. Help is welcome from anybody who is interesting in ensuring stability.
Another side effect is that "make check" now works in ECL. I have abandoned the development of "ecl-tests" and instead the tests are now integral part of ECL. In order to save space, the ANSI test suite is not shipped with ECL but rather automatically downloaded thanks to ECL's new components: ecl-curl and ecl-minitar. The test suite also allows downloading of quicklisp and automated testing of selected libraries.
In the end this was the last missing ingredient to resucitate our compiler farm, which is now up and running again: http://ecls.sourceforge.net/logs.html
Expect a new release soon, and also a few more posts on other upcoming features.
Cheers,
Juanjo
P.S.: I would like to thank the ELS organizers and steering committee for a wonderful meeting in Zadar. Great location, amazing food, and even better discussions.
