cells-devel

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567 discussions

[cells-devel] Major Cells fix (?)
by Kenny Tilton 14 May '04

14 May '04

I decided to address something about Cells I recently decided was Not Good: The echo of a cell (something conceived to permit side-effects outside the model dataflow) is permitted to kick off top-level (if you will) dataflow by setting some c-variable-mediated other slot. Fine. But echos run immediately after a new value has been assumed by a cell, before propagation to other cells. So what we had was echo-initiated top-level dataflow running to completion before the dataflow being echoed really got very far off the ground. And, yes, some very tricky misbehavior resulted, and I think is responsible for a lot of nasty code in Cells. Anyway, tonight I hacked a quick single-threading of such things: (defun (setf md-slot-value) .....<snip> ...unchanged testing for cyclicity.... (let ((absorbed-value (c-absorb-value c new-value))) ;; dicey: decide absorbed-value now or just before setf? ;; ...but we need a value to return even if actual setf will be deferred. ;; (count-it :md-slot-value-setf slot-spec) (if *df-entry* (progn (nconc *df-entry* (list (cons c (cons absorbed-value *cause*)))) absorbed-value) (let ((*df-entry* (list nil))) (c-slot-value-absorb c absorbed-value) (loop for (c-deferred . (deferred-value . echoing-asker)) in (cdr *df-entry*) do (let ((*cause* echoing-asker)) ;; sketchy (c-slot-value-absorb c-deferred deferred-value))) absorbed-value)))))) (defun c-slot-value-absorb (c absorbed-value) (with-dataflow-management (c) (md-slot-value-assume (c-model c) (c-slot-spec c) absorbed-value))) "absorb"? "assume"? gotta work on that. The light panel still works, but tracing shows not a lot of very challenging cases. RoboCup was the worst stress test Cells has gotten, stumping it easily even after seven years of refinement. I may dust off TeamKenny to see what I can see. I prefer real-world stressors to artifices. Actually, what I should do is disable all the "m/cmdead" testing, which I believe arose to handle problems caused only by overlapping dataflow steps: some echo would cause some instance (the active player task) to leave the model (supplanted or completed), but already in the call stack was code that was going to be operating on those instances in some way shape or form. So in a mad dash before ILC 2003 I ended up sprinkling "dead" tests about thirty times around the system. My hope is that this new patch will clear the dataflow propagation stack before the echo zaps the instance. More to come, I guess. kt -- Home? http://tilton-technology.com Cells? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/ Cello? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cello/ Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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[cells-devel] I'm Back
by Kenny Tilton 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

On the Cello side, the 1000-GF dispatch bottleneck is gone, and that does seem to have improved things by 20% or so. But I still get 10fps. This I presume is the step-function effect: I will not see a change in fps until I get fast enough to reach the next step in improvement, like 20fps. My next effort will be to implement display lists just at the widget level, so the containers (stacks and rows) will still go through their logic on each frame, but when it is time to draw a slider track or slider thumb (possibly even the combo) those will be done by display-lists. Stay tuned. kt -- Home? http://tilton-technology.com Cells? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/ Cello? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cello/ Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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[cells-devel] hiatus for relo
by Kenny Tilton 22 Apr '04

22 Apr '04

I'll be out of e-touch for a couple of days until I get reconnected (Friday according to plan) to the information superhighway. See ya then. kenny

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[cells-devel] ANNC: PortaCello3
by Kenny Tilton 17 Apr '04

17 Apr '04

I just uploaded PortaCello3.zip with .sig to: ftp://common-lisp.net/pub/project/cello Check out also the new scroller screen shot, now scrolling the lovely work of our own David Steuber, which he has made available with attribution under the Creative Commons license. ftp://common-lisp.net/pub/project/cello/mandel-scroller.jpg That same GIF happens to be a fine texture for shapes, including a sierpinski sponge, itself a fractal: ftp://common-lisp.net/pub/project/cello/mandel-sponge.jpg David explains that the lossy nature of JPG kills the image quality, so to see the above really well you have to... download and port Cello to your environment. :) The code as stands runs under AllegroCL (lprs included) and Lispworks on windows, and a reasonable facsimile has in the past been made to run under AllegroCL/Linux by Frank Goenninger. Speaking of AllegroCL lprs, the install notes just talk about the ASDF build process. Anyone using ACL can -- after adjusting configuration.lisp according to the install notes -- just run /dv//cello/cellodemo/cellodemo.lpr. Look for a PortaCello4 maintenance release, after which Kenny goes to work on his own project and porting proceeds only as others do ports. Future releases will continue, but will be KennyCellos, ie, just what he uses day-to-day. Eventually this will include a Mac OS X port, but that could be a lonnnnnnngggggg time from now. kenny -- Home? http://tilton-technology.com Cells? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/ Cello? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cello/ Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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[cells-devel] Unbound cells
by Thomas F. Burdick 14 Apr '04

14 Apr '04

I have a couple models where I'd like to have unbound slots that normally have cv cells in them. NIL is a valid value, so I can't just say "nil is the invalid value." What I'm doing is using a special invalid-value object when I'd normally have an unbound slot: (defconstant +unbound+ '+unbound+) (deftype %nil () '(or nil (eql +unbound+))) (defmacro define-unbound-methods (&body slot-specs) (loop for (class slot opt-accessor) in slot-specs for accessor = (or opt-accessor slot) collect `(defmethod ,accessor :around ((object ,class)) (let ((value (call-next-method))) (if (eq value +unbound+) (error 'slot-unbound :instance object :name ',slot) value))) into methods finally (return `(progn ,@methods)))) (defun cv_ () (cv +unbound+)) (defmodel my-handler (araneida:handler) ((user-id :accessor user-id :initarg user-id :initform (cv_) :documentation "user id or NIL if the user didn't supply valid credentials") (homepage :accessor homepage :initarg homepage :initform (c?_ (aif (id (^user-id)) (make-homepage-for-user id) (create-user-account)))))) (define-unbound-methods (my-handler userid)) (defmethod handle-request-authentication ((handler my-handler) method request) (setf (user-id h) ...)) If user-id is unbound, it means that authentication hasn't been performed yet, so it would be a program error to try to use its value at that point. It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to put the concept of unbound slots into Cells itself, so that storing the unbound-slot value would work fine, but reading it would signal a slot-unbound error. Add cell-makunbound and cell-boundp, and it would be the normal CLOS semantics again. Does this sound like a good idea? Or is there a more idiomatically Cells way of doing this, and I'm wandering too far down The Dark Path of Lazyness?

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[cells-devel] Re: [cello-devel] All GZ all the time?
by Thomas F. Burdick 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Bj=F8rn_Nordb=F8?= writes: > Yeah, I almost felt useful for a minute or so.. I'm still trying to > get the test suite for cells to pass or fail consistently on SBCL. :) Uh-oh, that doesn't sound so good. Care to elaborate? For me, there was one test that failed, and it did so consistently. It involved some part of Cells I haven't really touched, and I seem to remember Kenny convincing me that it wasn't a problem. I can go dig up something better than hazy recollections, if I need to :-). This was with sbcl-0.8.4. I've been doing some development with this combination, and it seems to work fine. What sbcl version are you using, and what's going wrong? (Hopefully it's trivial, since I'm in the middle of writing a web app for a client, using Cells. BTW, Cells + Araneida + SQLisp is a great combo, for anyone wondering.)

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[cells-devel] Re: [admin] new admin for cells/cello
by Kenny Tilton 11 Mar '04

11 Mar '04

Mario Mommer wrote: >I would like to recklessly seize the oportunity, and kindly urge you >to write something in the webpages of these two projects. > OK, will do. I use the Yahoo PageBuilder applet to develop my tilton-technology site, so I'll have to go to school on doing this manually. I can look at what kind of HTML Framemaker generates, or one of the many other HTML-generating apps I have. I also have an old Adobe GoLive relase on a Mac OS 9 box, maybe that will help. Or maybe someone interested in Cells/Cello ican do this in their sleep and will pitch in if I just produce the copy and, what?, GIFs? JPEGs? and say how to splice them. cheers, kenneth -- http://tilton-technology.com Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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Re: [cells-devel] asdf-install update (sort of)
by Kenny Tilton 09 Mar '04

09 Mar '04

Thomas F. Burdick wrote: >Kenny Tilton writes: > > > > Thomas F. Burdick wrote: > > > > >For those curious, I'll be using Cells to drive the application > > >(Kenny, you ever come up with a term for this? ). > > > > "Cells Inside"? If that is what you mean. Not sure. You mean a shorthand > > for "Cells-driven app", right? That's a tough one. > >Right. "Cells Inside" could mean all sorts of things, which wouldn't >necessarily involve driving the main application logic. If it weren't >a great road towards confusion with research-style constraints >systems, I'd say, "I'm using Cells as the constraints system," just >like I'd say, "I'm using Araneida as the web server." > I think the problem is that there is a pretty dramatic paradigm shift. Use a familiar word (constraints) and people cannot escape the gravitational pull of their knowledge of that domain; they understand, but the wrong thing. Make up a new word (animus-oriented programming) and people simply have no idea what you are going on about. Use a familiar term as an analog (spreadsheet for instances) and they have one of those two problems, either "No, I have to do a RoboCup team, not Visicalc" or "Hunh?". "Dataflow model" is tempting, but I think has the problem of "constraints". "cell-driven" is a lot easier to say than "cells-driven", but no one will understand you. How about "datapush"? "Causal programming"? It's a tough one. Probably the best thing to do is say cell-driven to avoid false sense of comprehension, then deal with the hunh? Builds the brand, too. :) I mean, basically, this is the time to pick the buzzword we'll have to live with. But should those things be picked, or should they just be the phrase we all settle on as shorthand without thinking about it? I like "animation" because it is novel as a programming metaphor and captures the essence of what cells do. "Animus" forces a "hunh?" to head off "no, I am not doing a cartoon...". The other highbrow way of looking at Cells is that they endow data with causal power over other data and, via echo, processes. The causal thing facilitates the animation thing. Causal is a deeper way of looking at it, animation is sexier. Something like that. kt -- http://tilton-technology.com Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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[cells-devel] asdf-install update (sort of)
by Thomas F. Burdick 09 Mar '04

09 Mar '04

For the contract I'm starting, I want all the open source software it's built on to be asdf-installable, so to that end I put an asdf-installable tarball of the 2003-11-08 distribution in http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/asdf-install/. CLiki wouldn't let me edit the cells page to update the link (I mailed Dan B about it), so you can't get it with (asdf-install:install :cells) quite yet, but almost. For those curious, I'll be using Cells to drive the application (Kenny, you ever come up with a term for this? ). And maybe for KR -- if it works out, it'll be simpler that way, if not, I can always fall back on my old tools (Garnet's KR).

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[cells-devel] corman second thoughts
by Kenny Tilton 06 Mar '04

06 Mar '04

It just occurred to me what the problem may have been that made me abandon the Corman and CLisp ports. The key Cells mechanism called "echoing" works via the generic function c-echo-slot-name. Two problems: the method combination is progn, and the dispatch requires EQL specialization. The first question is whether those limitations still apply to either implementation. Perhaps newer versions have fixed these. If not.. The method combo can be dispensed with. It did make a rare edge case easier to manage and then struck me as more appropriate to the necessary semantics, but normal method combo could have been made to work without too much work. Indeed, you'll see the defgeneric for c-echo-slot-name is featured-out for clisp and corman. As for the eql dispatch, that would require modifying def-c-echo to stash anonymous functions with gensym'ed names into a hash table...well, it would be ugly, and I think this is where I ran out of patience with corman and clisp. hopefully they have mended their CLOS ways. if not, I think someone really determined to make the port should not have that much trouble. these are nicely localized little problems, and I would certainly help and accept the changes into Cells/Cello. kenneth -- http://tilton-technology.com Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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