[m-dev.] For review: Mercury Meeting minutes

[Adrian Pellas-Rice]

Hi All.

I'm sorry but CVS setup is very broken... I would be grateful if someone
else could check this in.

Adrian Pellas-Rice
------------------

Estimated hours:  1.2



We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri Mar 2, 2001, 
from 3.15 to 4.00pm. 
 
Attendees: 
 Fergus Henderson (fjh) 
 Zoltan Somogyi (zs) 
 David Jeffery (dgj) 
 Simon Taylor (stayl) 
 David Overton (dmo) 
 Thomas Conway (conway) 
 Kevin Glynn (keving)
 Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell) 
 
1. Background

 We have recently acquired two more machines, miles, a laptop, and earth, a
 workstation.  Simon Taylor (stayl) has returned to the fold. The summer
 students being supervised by Zoltan (zs) have left the office, although some
 are continuing their work remotely. 

2. Progress reports 
 
 We went around the table with each person in turn discussing what they had
 been working on recently and/or what they were planning to work on.  

	 Fergus Henderson (fjh) 

		- some further work on the gcc back end.  At present,
		  installing libraries using mmake with the new back end does
		  not work.
		- merging in Robert Jeschofnik's (rejj) changes to allow the
		  expansion of equivalence types to work with the .NET and Java
		  backends.  Fergus expressed some uncertainty about how best
		  to go about these changes.  He then debated at length with
		  Zoltan Somogyi (zs) about whether/where equivalence types
		  should occur in .int* files.
		- plans a similar change for the handling of abstract
		  equivalence types.  Zoltan suggests that abstract equivalence
		  types should be expanded no earlier than code generation,
		  however Fergus was concerned that this would be too hard.
		  Zoltan offered an additional about idea using abstract maps
		  for this task.  Zoltan and Fergus agreed that this proposed
		  change is likely to conflict with Zoltan's current work.

	 David Overton (dmo)

		- has continued work on mode checking.  Is experimenting with
		  different representations, particularly hash tables and
		  bitsets.  Tom Conway (conway) mentioned that in David
		  Overton's case, specialisation of the calls to the library's
		  hash table module are highly desirable.  David Jeffery (dgj)
		  pointed out that the storage of the hash function in
		  the hash table data structure makes this a particularly
		  tricky task.

	 Zoltan Somogyi (zs)

		- has been fixing deep profiling bugs.  With these changes,
		  deep profiling now bootchecks.
		- posted the diff for liveness this week.  It bootchecks in two
		  grades and has been committed.
		- Has improved the accurate garbage collector so that it now
		  succeeds to the second stage of a bootcheck.  (It still bombs
		  out in stage three, of course.)

	 David Jeffery (dgj)

		- has been working on his thesis.  A draft will be ready
		  presently.

	 Kevin Glynn (keving)

		- At this point Kevin revealed that he was attending the
		  Mercury meeting for stress relief.  It may not have killed
		  him yet, but after that remark, Kevin's thesis is clearly
		  approaching the potency of ebola.

	 Simon Taylor (stayl)

		- has attended to software installation on earth.  (Recall that
		  `earth' is our new machine.)
		- fixed a performance bug in deforestation.

	 Thomas Conway (conway)

		- has been working on his thesis.
		- collaborated with Zoltan Somogyi (zs) on deep profiling.
		- plans to return to MDS within 3 weeks.

	 Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell)

		- continued the well-behind-schedule implementation of sequence
		  quantification.
		- had some further assistance from Fergus Henderson (fjh)
		  pertaining to a serious bug.


3. Administrative Matters:

	- Zoltan Somogyi (zs) complained about the frequency of the emails
	  requesting bug fixes.  The present frequency is one email per bug per
	  day.  After some debate, Fergus Henderson (fjh) agreed to change the
	  frequency to the compromise position of one email per bug per three
	  days.
		- On this note, Fergus also suggested splitting the [mdev]
		  mailing list into two lists: one for diffs and one for all
		  other correspondence.  Zoltan advocated an even more radical
		  split into several topic based lists.  Discussion will resume
		  at a later date.
	- Zoltan requested that more file systems be exported to miles (the
	  laptop), and requested assistance with some of the more concisely
	  documented software on miles.  Simon Taylor (stayl) agreed to see to
	  the file systems, David Overton (dmo) agreed to see to the software.

4. General Matters:

	- Fergus Henderson (fjh) and Zoltan Somogyi (zs) discussed a problem
	  with value numbering.  Though a temporary fix is in place, Zoltan
	  advocates the removal of value numbering as the long term repair
	  strategy.
	- There were some exchanges about the grades and modules that are
	  approaching redundancy.  Fergus wanted to dispose of the transient
	  register windows soon, but Zoltan would prefer to wait until the high
	  level back end supports debugging.  There was general agreement that
	  supporting high performance on the SPARC is no longer a priority, and
	  possible strategies for reducing the burden of the SPARC legacy were
	  mentioned.
	- Zoltan enquired about need to retain the old profiler once the new
	  (deep) profiler is completed.  Tom Conway (conway) declared that the
	  old profiler should be kept because a) in some cases it incurs less
	  overhead than the new profiler and b) it is easier to do time
	  profiling with the old profiler.  Zoltan observed that retaining both
	  profilers would be a great hassle, but said he would consider some of
	  the required changes.  

5. Release:

	- The 0.10 release has proceeded, with an announcement on
	  mercury-announce.
	- Fergus Henderson (fjh) expressed his desire to freeze 0.10.1 next
	  week, and reminded everyone to commit bug fixes on the main branch
	  too.
	- The release of 0.10.1 will be announced through the major channels as
	  well as mercury-announce.


Minutes taken by Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell at cs.mu.oz.au).



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