Re: Rational

[Hans Åberg]

> On 22 May 2018, at 22:07, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hans Åberg <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>>> On 22 May 2018, at 20:45, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 
>>> LilyPond's "rational" type should indeed get replaced
>>> by Guile's rational types which would seriously shift the threshold
>>> where things start breaking apart at the cost of efficiency.
>>> 
>>> That's quite a lot of tedious work (I have some started patches for
>>> different approaches to that) but of course if its seminal for someone's
>>> _own_ work, the motivation for finishing that might be larger.
>> 
>> Guile uses GMP internally, and it might be fairly easy to change the
>> class Rational to use GMP. Have you considered that?
> 
> Pointless.  The principal problem is that Rational is a fixed size
> struct without additional allocations to keep track of.  Guile's SCM
> isn't, and GMP's numbers aren't.  The garbage collection situation
> becomes more rather than less complicated by introducing yet another
> SCM-connected GMP type to be collected via Guile.

I realized after my first post that it might better to write it directly onto 
Guile. I wrote a C++ wrap for Guile:
  https://web2.storegate.com/share/TN6lmp5

> The grunt work to be done is to make sure that each SCM-connected class
> having Rational or Moment(!) members calls the respective mark hooks.

What are these mark hooks?

> This was somewhat complicated by some Midi classes being heap-allocated
> and containing Rational/Moment members: those Midi classes would have to
> become SCM-connected.  I did some work on that, don't remember how
> complete it was.

Guile uses the Boehm GC. I wrote a C++ wrap for that latter, too. As it turns 
out to be difficult to keep of pointers into the GC heap, I had to use only 
those that it supplies. Do you do that?

> Of course, the kind of abuse one gets for that work is not exactly an
> incentive.

That would probably not be the motivation.