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From: Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@xs4all.nl>
Cc: schottstaedt@ccrma.stanford.edu, guile-devel@gnu.org,
	Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Serious bug in GUILE rational handling.
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 01:59:07 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <458DD0DB.10302@xs4all.nl> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87slf66vw6.fsf@zip.com.au>

Kevin Ryde escreveu:
>> Suppose another thread triggers scm_i_fraction_reduce at the same
>> time, and reads the partial result of the first scm_i_fraction_reduce.
>> This is really insidious, as the corruption would happen upon reading
>> the data, and will show up somewhere completely different.
> 
> Yep.  I think I might have raised that when fractions were introduced,
> then promptly never did anything about it.  My best idea at the time
> was if fractions are stored unreduced then gc would be a good
> thread-safe place to look for reductions to save space.
> 
> I don't know if reduced or unreduced is a better representation.  My
> guess would be that gcds are so horrendously expensive that unreduced
> is often what you want, if it's do-able.  Reducing lazily sounds like
> the best of both worlds, but as you point out would need multithread
> protection.

Is there any data to back this up?  Once the numbers get beyond the
size of fixnum (and that can happen in just a couple of additions), we
have extra allocation overhead of 2 double cells per fraction (for
mpz), and from then on each addition will double the memory use.

Without reduction, doing a significant loop in fractional arithmetic
would make GUILE go trashing.  Have a look at the memory footprint of 

  (apply + (map (lambda (x)  1/10000) (iota 10000)))

At the least, a reduction should happen before trying to make a fraction 
that exceeds fixnum for numerator and/or denominator.  

-- 
 Han-Wen Nienhuys - hanwen@xs4all.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen


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  reply	other threads:[~2006-12-24  0:59 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2006-12-23 20:22 Serious bug in GUILE rational handling Han-Wen Nienhuys
2006-12-23 20:55 ` Han-Wen Nienhuys
2006-12-23 23:02   ` Kevin Ryde
2006-12-23 23:21 ` Kevin Ryde
2006-12-24  0:59   ` Han-Wen Nienhuys [this message]
2006-12-25 21:33     ` Kevin Ryde
2006-12-24  1:06   ` Han-Wen Nienhuys
2006-12-24  9:43     ` Kevin Ryde
2007-01-03 21:35   ` Carl Witty
2006-12-23 23:41 ` Kevin Ryde
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2006-12-24 11:32 Serious bug inn " Bill Schottstaedt
2006-12-29  2:52 ` Neil Jerram
2006-12-29 12:39   ` Serious bug in " Bill Schottstaedt
2006-12-30 20:42     ` Neil Jerram

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