Re: Help please! To track down GC trying to free an already freed object.

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Alex.

On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 22:49:22 -0600, Alex wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> > On Tue, Apr 02, 2019 at 13:33:02 -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:

> >> So if I read symbol foo from file1.el and symbol foo from file2.el,
> >> I get two different symbol-with-location instances, each tagged with
> >> a different source location? Do these symbol objects compare eq to
> >> each other?

> > They do, yes.  Otherwise the byte compiler wouldn't work, as it
> > frequently compares a symbol-with-position with a constant
> > ("ordinary") symbol using eq.

> > However, it is envisaged the flag symbols-with-pos-enable will be bound
> > to non-nil only by the byte compiler.  The reader resets this position to
> > zero for each top-level form it reads.

> I apologize if this topic already reached its conclusion, but IMO
> having eq return true for two different object types is quite
> surprising behaviour.

We are comparing two symbols, both of which are 'foo, but one of which is
annotated with its position in a source file.  The two symbols are the
same symbol.

I understand the reaction to the idea, though.  Even though the
representation of these two objects is different, conceptually they are
the same object.

But consider: on a make bootstrap I did last night, there were 332
warning messages from the byte compiler.  Of these, only 80 gave the
correct line/column position, the other 252 being wrong.  There have been
several bug reports from users complaining about such false positions.
This is what I'm trying to fix.

> Is it out of the question to leave eq alone and introduce, e.g.,
> eq-excluding-position that strips possible positions before comparison?

It is, rather.  To implement this would involve rewriting everything
which calls eq and is used by the byte compiler, to call
eq-excluding-position instead.  These functions would need to exist in
two versions.  There are rather a lot of functions which use eq.  ;-)

My actual strategy is to have two versions of each C primitive used by
the byte compiler, and to switch over to the "symbol-with-position"
version at the start of the byte compiler.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).