Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Small types.db fixes and some notes/questions

[Felix]

> - Maybe the C functions C_inexactp and such should be the ones that raise
>   the exception, rather than the Scheme code?  I don't know where else
>   they are used or what's most consistent/clean.

I would recommend to keep error-checking code out of the C runtime part as
much as possible. This allows the C primitives to be used in an unsafe context,
reduces the overall body of C code used and is easier to maintain.

> - The rewrites in c-platform.scm seem kind of redundant with the rewrites
>    done by the scrutinizer and possibly wrong for these cases too, so
>    another potential hiding place for many bugs.
>   Now that we have the scrutinizer I think they can probably be removed
>   altogether without loss of performance in compiled code.  This should
>   also result in faster compilation times since the rewriting code seems
>   rather complicated too (and it's hard to understand, so getting rid of
>   it is probably a good idea maintenance-wise too).
>   I'm just not sure whether all functionality is truly duplicated in
>   types.db.  Of course if we remove it, this should wait until after
>   4.8.0 is released.

I agree completely. Specialization makes many rewrites unnecessary.

> - I noticed that with -O4, the following code passes cleanly:
> 
>     (define-syntax assert-fail
>       (syntax-rules ()
>       ((_ exp) (assert (handle-exceptions ex #t exp #f)))))
>     (assert (exact? 1))
>     (assert (not (exact? 1)))
>     (assert-fail (exact? 1))
> 
>   Could someone explain how this is possible?  -debug o didn't
>   really help, nor did ripping the rewrites from c-platform.scm

"assert" expands into "##core#check", which is removed in unsafe mode.


cheers,
felix