Re: Immediate doubles (up to 2^256) and rationals coming to Guile 3

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>> Though an immediate, like a fixnum or an iflo, is still something
>> different from a tagged heap object like a pair, right?  So I would
>> expect SCM_THOB_P to be a different test, not a drop-in replacement for
>> SCM_NIMP, is that correct?
>
> That's right.  It's not possible to create a drop-in replacement for
> SCM_NIMP, because it is being used to answer two different questions
> which used to be effectively equivalent, but no longer are:
>
> (1) Is X a pointer to a heap object with a heap tag in the first word?
> (2) Is X a reference to a heap object?
>
> Test (1) needs to be done before checking the heap tag, to implement
> type predicates for heap objects.  Test (2) is needed in relatively few
> places, e.g. to decide whether to register disappearing links when
> adding an entry to a weak hash table.
>
> Actually, in my current branch I've removed the SCM_IMP and SCM_NIMP
> macros outright, because it seems to me they are likely to be misused.
>
> SCM_THOB_P implements test (1) and SCM_HEAP_OBJECT_P implements test (2).

I see.

> There's no masking involved.  Rather, it is subtracted from the pointer,
> which allows the tag to be fused with the field offset.  For example, on
> x86-64, whereas CAR and CDR were previously:
>
>      1c0:   48 8b 07                mov    (%rdi),%rax      ;old car
> and:
>      1d0:   48 8b 47 08             mov    0x8(%rdi),%rax   ;old cdr
>
> Now they become:
>
>      1e0:   48 8b 47 fa             mov    -0x6(%rdi),%rax  ;new car
> and:
>      1f0:   48 8b 47 02             mov    0x2(%rdi),%rax   ;new cdr

Looks reasonable.  :-)

> Fortunately, BDW-GC provides GC_REGISTER_DISPLACEMENT, which allows us
> to register a small offset K, such that BDW-GC should recognize pointers
> that point K bytes into a heap block.  We've been using this in both 2.0
> and 2.2 from scm_init_struct (), and in 'master' it's done in
> scm_storage_prehistory ().
>
> This new approach entails registering one additional displacement.

Cool; if it’s just one displacement, that’s OK.

> What do you think?

It all looks perfectly reasonable to me!

Thanks for explaining,
Ludo’.