Opened 3 years ago

Closed 3 years ago

Last modified 3 years ago

#14948 closed enhancement (fixed)

guile-3.0.6

Reported by: Douglas R. Reno Owned by: Bruce Dubbs
Priority: normal Milestone: 11.0
Component: BOOK Version: git
Severity: normal Keywords:
Cc:

Description

New point version

Change History (4)

comment:1 by Bruce Dubbs, 3 years ago

Owner: changed from blfs-book to Bruce Dubbs
Status: newassigned

comment:2 by Bruce Dubbs, 3 years ago

Changes in 3.0.6 (since 3.0.5)

  • Notable changes

Reimplement dynamic library loading ("dlopening") without libltdl

Guile used to load dynamic libraries with libltdl, a library provided by the Libtool project.

Libltdl provided some compatibility benefits when loading shared libraries made with older toolchains on older operating systems. However, no system from the last 10 years or so appears to need such a thick compatibility layer.

Besides being an unmaintained dependency of limited utility, libltdl also has the negative aspect that in its search for libraries to load, it could swallow useful errors for libraries that are found but not loadable, instead showing just errors for search path candidates that are not found.

Guile now implements dynamic library loading directly in terms of the standard "dlopen" interface, providing a limited shim for platforms with similar functionality exposed under different names (MinGW).

This change has a few practical impacts to Guile users. There is a new library search path variable, `GUILE_EXTENSIONS_PATH'. Also, errors when loading a library fails now have better errors. And Guile no longer has a libltdl dependency.

Although Guile no longer uses libltdl, for backwards compatibility Guile still adds `LTDL_LIBRARY_PATH' to the loadable library search path, and includes ad-hoc logic to support uninstalled dynamically loadable libraries via also adding the ".libs" subdirectories of `LTDL_LIBRARY_PATH' elements. See "Foreign Libraries" in the documentation for a full discussion.

Fix important incompatibility with GnuTLS

Guile uses the GNU multi-precision (GMP) library to implement arbitrary-precision integers (bignums) and fractions. Usually Guile is built to dynamically link to libgmp. In this configuration, any other user of GMP in the process uses the same libgmp instance, with the same shared state.

An important piece of shared state is the GMP allocator, responsible for allocating storage for the digits of large integers. For Guile it's most efficient to install libgc as the GMP allocator. That way Guile doesn't need to install finalizers, which have significant overhead, to free GMP values when Guile bignums are collected. Using libgc to allocate digits also allows Guile's GC to adequately measure the memory cost of these values.

However, if the Guile process is linked to some other user of GMP, then probably the references from the other library to GMP values aren't visible to the garbage collector. In this case libgc could prematurely collect values from that other GMP user.

This isn't theoretical, sadly: it happens for Guile-GnuTLS. GnuTLS uses GMP, and so does Guile. Since Guile 2.0.4, Guile has installed libgc as the GMP allocator, so since then, Guile-GnuTLS has been buggy.

Therefore, the default is now to not install libgc as the GMP allocator. This may slow down some uses of bignums. If you know that your Guile program will never use a library that uses GMP, you can set the GUILE_INSTALL_GMP_MEMORY_FUNCTIONS=1 in your environment. Guile sets this environment variable when building Guile, for example. See "Environment Variables" in the manual, for more.

In some future, Guile may switch to GMP's more low-level "MPN" API for working with bignums, which would allow us to regain the ability to use GC-managed digit storage in all configurations.

New build option: --enable-mini-gmp

For some users, it would be preferable to bundle a private copy of the GMP bignum library into Guile. Some users would like to avoid the extra dependency. Others would like to use libgc to manage GMP values, while not perturbing the GMP allocator for other GMP users.

For these cases, Guile now has an --enable-mini-gmp configure option, which will use a stripped-down version of GMP, bundled with Guile. This code doesn't have all the algorithmic optimizations of full GMP, but implements the same API in a basic way. It can be more optimal in a Guile context, given that it can use libgc to allocate its data.

Note that a build with --enable-mini-gmp is not ABI-compatible with a "stock" build, as functions that use GMP types (scm_to_mpz, scm_from_mpz) are not exported.

Thanks to Niels Möller and other GMP developers for their mini-gmp implementation!

New `read' implementation in Scheme

Guile's `read' procedure has been rewritten in Scheme. Compared to the C reader (which still exists for bootstrapping reasons), the new implementation is more maintainable, more secure, more debuggable, all while faithfully reproducing all quirks from Guile's previous reader implemented in C. Also, the Scheme reader is finally compatible with suspendable ports, allowing REPL implementations to be built with lightweight concurrency packages such as the third-party "Fibers" library. Calls to read' from Scheme as well as calls to scm_read' from C use the new reader.

The Scheme implementation is currently about 60% as fast as the now-inaccessible C implementation, and we hope to close the gap over time. Bug reports very welcome.

Scheme compiler uses `read-syntax' for better debugging

The new Scheme reader also shares implementation with the new `read-syntax' procedure, which annotates each datum with source location information. Guile's compiler can use this to provide better source-level debugging for Scheme programs. Note that this can slightly increase compiled file sizes, though this is mitigated by some assembler optimizations.

Syntax objects record source locations

When compiling a file that defines a macro, the output will usually include a number of syntax objects as literals. Previously, these literals had no source information; now they do. This should improve debugging.

Optimized run-time relocations

The code that patches references between statically-allocated Scheme data has been optimized to be about 30% shorter than before or so, which can significantly decrease compiled file size and run-time initialization latency.

Optimized calls to known functions

For calls where the callee is within the compilation unit, Guile can now skip the argument count check.

Reduce code size for calls to module variables

All calls to a given exported or private variable from a module now dispatch through the same trampoline function. This reduces code size.

Updated Gnulib

The Gnulib compatibility library has been updated, for the first time since 2017 or so. We expect no functional change but look forward to any bug reports.

  • New interfaces and functionality

`call-with-port'

See "Ports" in the manual.

call-with-input-bytevector', call-with-output-bytevector'

See "Bytevector Ports" in the manual.

`GUILE_EXTENSIONS_PATH' environment variable.

See "Environment Variables" in the manual.

mkdtemp' and mkstemp'

See "File System" in the manual. There is still `mkstemp!' but we recommend that new code uses `mkstemp', which does not mutate the contents of the "template" argument string. Instead for `mkstemp' you get the name of the newly-created file by calling `port-filename' on the returned port.

`(system foreign-library)' module

See the newly reorganized "Foreign Function Interface", for details. These new interfaces replace dynamic-link', dynamic-pointer' and similar, which will eventually be deprecated.

`read-syntax'

See "Annotated Scheme Read" in the manual.

`quote-syntax'

See "Syntax Case" in the manual.

`syntax-sourcev'

See "Syntax Transformer Helpers" in the manual.

  • Optimizations

eof-object? R6RS vector-map, vector-for-each

  • Bug fixes

Fix reverse-list->string docstring Fix R7RS "member" result when no item found Fix make-transcoded-port on input+output ports Fix (ice-9 ftw) on filesystems where inode values are meaningless Fix many bugs that prevented Guile from building on MinGW Fix many bugs that prevented Guile from building on MinGW64 Fix many bugs that prevented Guile's test suite from running on MinGW Fix srfi-69 merge-hash Fix suspendable-ports implementation of get-bytevector-some! Fix overread in string-locale<?, string-locale-ci<?, and friends Fix handling of parameter lists to elisp defun to allow nil Fix closure-conversion bug for SCC with no free vars and one not-well-known function Fix error when < passed non-real value Fix bug in which exported and private names in a used module could alias each other Fix bug with slot options in redefinable GOOPS classes Fix bugs regarding port buffering for TLS connections in web client

  • New deprecations

`dynamic-unlink'

This function now has no effect; Guile will not unload dynamically linked modules, as that can destabilize the system.

  • Incompatible changes

`call-with-output-string' closes port on normal exit

This procedure used to leave the port open, even though there was no useful way to access it. Now we clean it up more promptly, disposing any possible associated iconv descriptor.

comment:3 by Bruce Dubbs, 3 years ago

Resolution: fixed
Status: assignedclosed
7505e5727b Update to tcsh-6.22.04wq
f8660abe42 Update to hdparm-9.61
2e542e286c Update to guile-3.0.6
6494b9f622 Update to fdk-aac-2.0.2
15504231f0 Update to at-spi2-core-2.40.1

comment:4 by Bruce Dubbs, 3 years ago

Milestone: 10.211.0

Milestone renamed

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