Re: Dynamic loading progress

[Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>]

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Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> schrieb am So., 15. Feb. 2015 um
21:21 Uhr:

> Here's a broad outline of what I have in mind.
>

Thanks, that looks really good. Just a few minor issues that I encountered
over the last couple of weeks.


> Thread-local environments
> -------------------------
>
> The `get_environment' member lets us do anything else interesting. As
> in Java, environments are thread-local. We only support one thread for
> the moment, so this constraint is easy to enforce. (Just abort if we
> use an emacs_env off the main thread.)
>

Would you really abort, or rather use the error handling functions? We
should be able to make the error values thread-local so that calling a
function from the wrong thread would be the equivalent of raising a signal,
giving the caller a chance to react. Otherwise the burden of remembering
the correct thread would be on the caller's side.


>   typedef struct emacs_value_tag* emacs_value;
>

I think it's important that this is a pointer to a struct (for type safety
and size correctness) rather than just an arbitrary type.


>
>   typedef emacs_value (*emacs_subr)(
>     emacs_env* env,
>     int nargs,
>     emacs_value args[]);
>

Could we give this a void* data parameter for storing arbitrary user data?
This is common for callbacks in C interfaces and allows C++ users to store
C++ objects in the pointer. This can be implemented using another save
pointer.


>    emacs_value (*make_function)(
>       emacs_env* env,
>       int min_arity,
>       int max_arity,
>       emacs_subr function);
>

Similary, here void* data should be passed to be retrieved later.


>
>     emacs_value (*funcall)(
>       emacs_env* env,
>       emacs_value function,
>       int nargs,
>       emacs_value args[]);
>

Does function have to be a function object, or can it be a symbol? I.e. is
the user supposed to call symbol-function first?


>     int64_t (*fixnum_to_int)(
>       emacs_env* env,
>       emacs_value value);
>
>     emacs_value (*make_fixnum)(
>       emacs_env* env,
>       int64_t value);
>
>
What's the behavior of these functions if the source would not fit into the
result? Undefined behavior, abort(), raising a signal?


> Modules can use make_global_reference to allocate a global reference
> (i.e., a GC root) for any emacs_value; modules must then free these
> references explicitly.
>
> All routines (except make_global_reference) that return emacs_value
> values return local references.  It's up to modules to register
> long-lived references explicitly.
>

In which cases would global references be necessary?


> Like JNI, we can just declare that it's illegal to call all but a few
> specially-marked functions (like global reference deregistration) with
> a pending error.
>

What's the behavior if other functions are called? abort()?


> If Lisp signals or throws, `funcall' returns NULL.
>

Hmm, with the current implementation emacs_value is just the same as
Lisp_Object, i.e. not a real pointer, so NULL doesn't have specific
semantics. Should it return Qnil instead and force the user to use
check_error?


> 1) Do we need JNI-style local variable frames and functions that
>    release local references?
>
> 2) Maybe we want a separate, non-emacs_value type for global references?
>

No idea about these.


>
> 3) How exactly do we represent catch/throw values?
>

I've thought about this a bit, and I think it would be simplest to add a
new function env->set_throw and have get_error and check_error return an
enum { normal, signal, throw }. One could come up with something like
creating a list (error-kind error-tag error-value), but it looks like the
module implementation would create such lists only for the module code to
convert them back, so it's simpler to represent the two kinds of non-local
exits directly in the interface.


>
> 4) Do we need to use int64_t for integers?
>

Maybe just intmax_t and a static check that that is larger than an Elisp
integer?

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