rdnzl-devel February 2006

rdnzl-devel@common-lisp.net

3 participants
5 discussions

[rdnzl-devel] Type lookup problems, and solutions.
by Dan Muller 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

(Gruess Gott, Edi, hoffentlich war der Umzug nicht allzu anstrengend!) Remember that problem I was having importing some types? I'm not sure why, but on my system, System.Type.GetTypes is more picky than RDNZL seems to expect: ;;; ;;; To demonstrate these failing tests, start with a clean Lisp image, ;;; then load RDNZL, then load this file. Assemblies can't be ;;; unloaded except by unloading their containing application domain, ;;; and you can't unload the default application domain. ;;; ;;; It's possible that the tests are sensitive to the assemblies ;;; available on my machine, but I can't find an indication in ;;; Microsoft's documentation of why that might be the case. ;;; (in-package :cl-user) (use-package :rdnzl) (import-assembly "System.Windows.Forms") ;; This fails, because the system doesn't find the type. ;; Comment it out and try reloading to move on to the next test. (new "System.Windows.Forms.Form") ;; This fails, too. Same problem. ;; Comment it out and try reloading to move on to the next test. (import-type "System.Windows.Forms.Form") ;; I also tried direct calls to System.Type.GetType with various ;; abbreviations of the fully qualified type name, leaving off ;; trailing pieces of the full assembly name. None of these succeeded. ;; This succeeds. (import-type "System.Windows.Forms.Form" (load-assembly "System.Windows.Forms")) ;; This succeeds, because RDNZL now remembers what assembly it found ;; Form in. (let ((form ;; This fails, because the system doesn't find the type. (new "System.Windows.Forms.Form"))) (invoke form "Dispose")) <end of test code> I spent a lot of time poking around in RDNZL and the .NET framework, and reading documentation. The documentation is for 2.0, FWIW, but I was careful to look only at classes and methods that were available in 1.1. What follows is a rather lengthy discussion of some possible improvements/fixes I've come up with. This goes rather beyond fixing the immediate problem, but please give it some consideration. - Have IMPORT-TYPE always retrieve and cache the assembly-qualified name of the type. Downside: This will include the exact version. This means that in a delivered application involving a saved image, there is no way to use an updated version of a used assembly. (Haven't tested for this, though.) Might be an acceptable short-term fix, though. - Have IMPORT-ASSEMBLY supply the assembly to IMPORT-TYPE. Good idea, since it's currently inconsistent about this vis-a-vis IMPORT-TYPES. But it doesn't address the problem described above. - In MAKE-TYPE-FROM-NAME, do the following. If the name is assembly-qualified (contains an unquoted paren), then use System.Type.GetType() as before. Otherwise, call System.Reflection.Assembly.GetType() on each assembly returned by System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(). The search should be exhaustive in order to detect ambiguities, which should be signaled as errors. In IMPORT-TYPE, don't accept assembly-qualified names, and cache the actual type object instead of the fully-qualified name. During shutdown, discard these type object references. During initialization, do the lookups again. (Changes to assemblies that introduce ambiguities will cause an error during initialization.) Downsides: Names given to RDNZL for resolution must not be assembly-qualified. (Or, perhaps better, detect these and don't cache them.) It is not possible for the system to deal predictably with like-named types in multiple assemblies. All loaded assemblies would be searched, even if they were not loaded via RDNZL. The latter problem might be a liability for advanced uses, e.g. involving dynamic assemblies that are being built by the application. I tried creating a C# console application that used two assemblies with conflicting type names. You get an error only if you actually reference the conflicting type name. The error documentation explains how C# allows this problem to be worked around, using a compiler switch that assigns a prefix to all namespaces in a given assembly: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/64wh5743.aspx AFAIK, implementing a similar solution requires work on the compiler's part. I have not noticed any direct support for this aliasing in the .NET framework. So a similar solution in RDNZL would require tracking assemblies. However, this might be desirable in order to address the other problem mentioned above. If RDNZL would track loaded assemblies, only those assemblies would be searched for type name matches. If we associate an optional alias with an assembly (e.g. via an optional argument to LOAD-ASSEMBLY), then that assembly would only be searched if the type name includes the prefix, and only after removing the prefix. As a further enhancement, I'd like to actually get rid of the need for importing entirely. It doesn't seem unreasonable to search for a type regardless of whether it has been imported or not, provided that it is then always cached in *TYPE-HASH*. This way *TYPE-HASH* builds up information about all types referenced via RDNZL. Users can still make calls to primitives like System.Type.GetType() if they ever want to bypass such activity. This is also true for LOAD-ASSEMBLY, if it starts tracking assemblies. Of course, the aliasing wouldn't work if you bypass RDNZL. I have prototyped some of the low-level pieces needed for these changes, entirely in Lisp using RDNZL. I didn't want to put more work into it unless I'm sure there's interest in including it in RDNZL. (Or at least, I'll do the work differently if there isn't.) I'm particularly uncertain about issues related to saving and loading Lisp images, something I've never tried out, although I think I understand the basic concerns there. -- Dan Muller ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

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[rdnzl-devel] Re: New version 0.9.3
by Edi Weitz 19 Feb '06

19 Feb '06

[Re-routing to the mailing list.] On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:21:14 -0500, "Dan Muller" <s8ctxw402(a)sneakemail.com> wrote: > I'll try it out tonight and let you know how it works. Good. > I'm thinking that a cleaner solution might be an optional > target-type argument to BOX, although that requires RDNZL to pick > the conversion needed. Yeah, maybe. The advantage of my workaround is that you don't have to call BOX explicitely because RDNZL calls it as needed. So, you should be able to just INVOKE a method with arguments like 3.4d2 and RDNZL will convert it to a System.Single automatically. > Or a perhaps even more generally, a way to call a method of an > object or type with some arguments, but get the return value without > conversion, boxed if necessary. With that, I could have called > System.Convert.ToSingle and gotten a boxed Single back. Perhaps > calling it INVOKE-RETURNING-CONTAINER. But you'd have to do this for PROPERTY and FIELD as well. And you'd lose the advantages of the special reader syntax. A bit messy. > Thanks a lot for writing RDNZL. This is ever so much easier than > fooling around with FFIs to call C or C++ APIs. > > As I'm going along, I'm writing a few small utilities to help with > various common tasks. When I've had more experience with this, I'll > offer them for inclusion in RDNZL. That would be nice. Cheers, Edi.

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[rdnzl-devel] (no subject)
by Dan Muller 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

My first post to this list... I started playing around with RDNZL, Direct3D 9.0, and the evaluation version of LispWorks for Windows about a week ago. Very nice! But I've run into an interesting problem. Direct3D uses single floats throughout its interface, but in LispWorks for Windows, all floating point types are equivalent to double-float. So I've got this rather difficult situation, where RDNZL can never find a method if it takes a single float argument! Even if it could find it, a down-conversion from double to single float would be needed, which probably shouldn't occur implicitly. I tried explicitly calling System.Convert.ToSingle, but by the time I can get my hands on the return value, it has been turned back into a double! I haven't been able to figure out a way around this without modifying RDNZL, or writing some sort of .NET function that returned a boxed single. But I'm not sure that the latter wouldn't be unboxed, or that it would give the correct type for the method lookup in RDNZL. Any ideas? -- Dan Muller ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

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[rdnzl-devel] Problem with invoking static member
by Jim Sokoloff 13 Feb '06

13 Feb '06

(Apologies if this posts twice; I outsmarted myself with mailman, and I tried to cancel the first one that mailman thought was posted by a non list member.) Hi, I'm having trouble invoking a static member on a class. I've reduced the case to the following simple test case, and I suspect I may be missing somewhat simple. (I'm far from a Lisp wizard. Far...) Basically, I'm trying to load a C# assembly, and be able to call a static method on it. I can call instance methods without issue, but make-type-from-name is not working the way I expect it should, and therefore, calling static methods fails. Any help would be appreciated! --Jim Source code and sample interaction below: Lisp interaction: (win32, using slime and clisp-2.38, but I doubt it makes any difference) Some output trimmed for legibility. CL-USER> (load "/c/vp/devenv/lib/clisp/rdnzl-0.9.1/load.lisp") CL-USER> (in-package :rdnzl) RDNZL> (enable-rdnzl-syntax) RDNZL> (setq lisp-sample-assembly (import-assembly [System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom "C:\\temp\\bin\\Debug\\LispSample1.dll"])) RDNZL> (setq p (new (import-type "LispSample1.Parrot" lisp-sample-assembly) "Bob")) #<CONTAINER LispSample1.Parrot #x2929E6A8> RDNZL> (ffi-call-with-args %invoke-instance-member p "SayHello" '(42)) 47 RDNZL> (resolve-type-name "LispSample1.Parrot") "LispSample1.Parrot, LispSample1, Version=1.0.2230.24825, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" ;; To me, it appears that that worked. RDNZL> (make-type-from-name (resolve-type-name "LispSample1.Parrot")) #<CONTAINER NULL #x2929E540> RDNZL> ;; ^^^^ This appears to be as close to the root of the problem as ;; I am able to get RDNZL> (invoke p "SayHello" 17) 22 ;; this worked (There is stdout output, but my slime discards it.) RDNZL> (invoke p "StaticSayHello" "Bill" 17) ; Evaluation aborted ;; failed - .NET error (System.Exception): Instance method not found: LispSample1.Parrot::StaticSayHello(System.String,System.Int32) ;; Of course, it's not an instance method... RDNZL> (invoke "LispSample1.Parrot" "StaticSayHello" "Bill" 17) Trying to call function %INVOKE-STATIC-MEMBER with NULL object #<CONTAINER NULL #x292961E0>. C# class is here, compiled into an assembly: C:\temp\bin\Debug\LispSample1.dll using System; namespace LispSample1 { public class Parrot { private string m_name; public Parrot(string name) { m_name = name; } public int SayHello(int value) { Console.WriteLine("Hello {0}.", m_name); return value + 5; } static public int StaticSayHello(string name, int value) { Console.WriteLine("Hello {0}.", name); return value * 2; } } }

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[rdnzl-devel] New release 0.9.0 / Experimental support for SBCL
by Edi Weitz 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

ChangeLog: Version 0.9.0 2006-02-01 Experimental support for SBCL/Win32 Download: <http://weitz.de/files/RDNZL.tar.gz> Cheers, Edi.

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rdnzl-devel February 2006