Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Clean up some code

[Peter Bex]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 11:50:48PM +0200, Felix wrote:
> > Here are two cleanup patches which take care of things that were in my
> > notes.  The first is a couple of procedures which are simply unused.
> > Two of those are marked "for binary compatibility", but have been marked
> > as such for a long time (since 2010).  I think we don't need to bump the
> > binary version since that has already happened a few times in between
> > and nothing in the new version generates code that uses these procedures.
> 
> Note that some routines might be used by eggs. In particular
> "##sys#call-with-cthulhu", which is used in the "suspensions"
> egg. Moreover, that procedure is quite useful, it serves a paticular
> need. I can't go into details in public, because THEY mustn't know
> about this - I'm sure you understand.

Of course.

> I have to go over the other removals and have to check whether they
> are truly not needed anymore.

Excellent.

> > The second patch removes the last remnants of the unboxing code.  The
> > compiler doesn't generate calls to them anymore, and they're all inlined
> > procedures or C macros, so I think they can be safely taken out.
> 
> Rather not, as unboxing will come back sooner or later.

Oooh, is that a promise? ;)

> > There are still quite a few occurrances of the word "box" in the
> > compiler, though.  Can those all be removed?  It looks like some type
> > of boxing still exists, even if not the full boxing/unboxing that was
> > taken out.  Could someone explain the purpose of this?
> 
> Which occurrances do you mean exactly?

Just grep for "box".  There's some stuff in the optimizer which marks
stuff as 'boxed, and the compiler.scm recognises core forms like ##core#box.

Cheers,
Peter
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