Re: Serious bug inn GUILE rational handling

[Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@xs4all.nl>]

Bill Schottstaedt escreveu:
>> I have removed support for the reduced bit, and put the reduction in
>> make_fraction.
> 
> I think it was intended that equal? would use scm_i_fraction_equalp
> which reduces both arguments before checking equality.  So the
> simplest fix would be to mask off the reduced bit in the cell type
> in the check for cell type equality in scm_equalp.  I would hesitate
> to remove support for this bit because it will mean you get gcd
> on every integer divide!  The current system already slows Guile

I think thes best quick fix would be to put the bit into the 4th 
double cell word. 

> down by about 10%.   On the race condition, my vage recollection
> is that the "is this safe?" question was mine, and I hoped at that
> time that someone who knew about such things would check it
> out -- I believe (it's been a long time since I looked at this stuff)
> that if that line is not safe, there are a lot more like it scattered
> around Guile, so it's scarcely reason to jettison the entire thing.

In that case, we need to fix the more-like-it stuff.  Can you point out 
some of those cases? 

I'm hesitant to put stuff like this in because 

1. it _is_ a race condition

2. if it is triggered, it will be next to impossible to reproduce. In
effect this would lead to a once in a million inexplicable corruption.
And that's really bad.

The correct solution would be a to use a lock-free instruction to 
swap the old and reduced forms, but I'm not sure if we have those in 
GUILE.

As I explained earlier, the logic for doing reduces or not needs to be
more refined. Any program that does serious arithmetic in fractions 
will likely have exploding memory requirements.

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



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