Dear Lisp hackers,

I wasted quite some time today with a weird weird bug.

I was streamlining the build of Lisp code within Google, which will now use as little of ASDF as possible to take advantage of their massively scalable build system, blaze: http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/08/build-in-cloud-how-build-system-...

Of course, I wanted to reuse the infrastructure of UIOP, without the rest of ASDF/DEFSYSTEM that my colleagues were wary to exclude (at least by default) from the build. Now, I was dumping an image with dump-image, restoring it with restore-image, which was hooking into the declared *image-entry-point*, and everything was sailing from there, receiving via the shell interface commands to execute build actions. One of the actions, of course, was in turn to build new lisp executables. And there: fail. Somehow the new binary was refusing to see anything but the default values of the *image-restore-hook* or *image-entry-point*. What the $%^@?

The problem, fixed in ASDF 3.1.0.8, was that restore-image itself was binding the special variables for *entry-point* and *image-restore-hook*. This meant that the global bindings were now shadowed, yet, it is those global bindings now unreachable that SBCL would be preserving at next dump-image. Oops. Conclusion: there are a few cases particularly in application construction, where you really want to be accessing the global bindings of a variable, and where dynamic binding is a no-no. Thanks to pkhuong for confirming the behavior of SBCL.

I learned that lesson the hard way. I hope you don't have to.

In other news, when you have massive distributed systems, you can really trade off 10x CPU for ¼x latency on top of a previous a tradeoff of O(n)xCPU for O(1)xlatency. Slave away, CPUs, we want low latency on large Lisp compilations!

(The O(n)xCPU for O(1) saving in latency is parallelizing, where every file has to be loaded once for every other file that depends on it, rather than once — the classic XCVB more. The further 10xCPU for 4x saving in latency is loading dependencies as source code in unoptimized interpret mode, rather than waiting for 4x slower compilation then loading fast from 10x faster fasl or 50x faster cfasl.)

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org "If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one." — Robert LeFevre