Sunday, September 23, 2012

Dash search results

Do you know what is Dash on Ubuntu? I just get it after few search attempts on Google...

The main reason for this post is hilarious comment on Hacker News. Honestly, I'm still amazed (and amused) how they never fixed this thing.

I tried it couple of times; when the first Unity version came, then later after few updates and always would getting the same thing this guy or girl did: nothing ;)

Friday, September 7, 2012

Hello TinyCLOS

A couple of days ago, in edelib tree landed TinyCLOS, a CLOS-like object system for Scheme. I used original implementation and thanks to it's excellent design, I had to change only a couple of lines of code to adapt it.

The main reason for adding it was to stress Scheme interpreter with some serious code so it placed inside edelib test suite and is not installed with the rest of the library.

Truth to be told, I was surprised when TinyCLOS loaded for the first time. Within first runs, I manage to detect a few nasty bugs: two in Scheme functions (append and reverse) and one in interpreter garbage collector. Everything was corner case so ordinary code used by EDE would probably not catch it, but who knows.

Another surprise is startup time: loading TinyCLOS is dog slow and with a couple of tests, it will require almost 10 seconds to complete where around 7-8 seconds will be reserved for library load. That is brutal!

I haven't had enough time to look deeply what the cause is, but one of the reasons could be eager creation of primitive class objects (<class>, <boolean> and so on); the second reason is definitely a large number of GC calls. In both cases things can be improved, which I marked as TODO for upcoming time.