Re: [Tack-devel] all of Ack-5.5 under Linux

[<u-...@ae...>]

Hello David,

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 04:53:26PM +0200, David Given wrote:
> Very belatedly, I got em binaries working with the 6.0 stream, and there's
> a basic em22 platform. It's all in head of git and it's built automatically
> so you can just check out, build, install, and do:
> 
> $ /usr/local/lib/ack/int /usr/local/share/ack/examples/mandelbrot_c.em22

Congratulations!

I appreciate your work on Ack and understand that the new build tools
make your development easier or feasible at all.

Unfortunately, the new Ack-6* build stuff did not really fit in my
development model. I tried it earlier, before porting ackpack.

One property is that the new build tools are more "complex" than the
target, they can not be built/maintained without yet other tools, much
more complicated than ack.

Ack used to be dependent only on the V7-era stuff and I try to keep its
maintenance in that complexity domain. (According to the commits, up to
version 4 Ack was apparently small enough to be hosted even on pdp-11.)

The other thing is the semantics of different directories.
This is not exactly consistent in the original Ack (at least where the
stuff is being installed, objects of different classes/namespaces are
often mixed in common directories) but I find it even harder to follow
in the new one. What is the semantics of "mach" vs "plat"?

> ...and it should work. However, I discovered huge problems with the libc in
> the process and it needs refactoring --- turns out that it largely only
> works by accident at the moment, so I'm taking some time out to try and fix
> that before adding em24 and em44.

Is it because of some changes in libc or is the problem present in 5.5?

I can confirm that the interpreter indeed needs some fixing.

Tested a program which worked reliably both
 natively, built with ackpack for linux on ia32, and
 under apout, when built with ack-5.5 for v7unix on pdp.

It worked on small data also under em22/int but crashed at some point
given a larger dataset (not affecting the amount of the needed memory
but among others the number of de/allocations).

Regards,
Rune