[m-dev.] for review: minutes of meeting 09/03/2001
David Overton
dmo at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Mon Mar 12 23:31:02 AEDT 2001
Hi,
Here are the minutes from the last two meetings.
The 2/3 minutes were written by apell and have already been reviewed.
Adrian was unable to commit them, however, due to problems with his
account.
Estimated hours taken: 0.5
w3/news/reportsdb.inc:
w3/information/reports/minutes_02_03_01.html:
w3/information/reports/minutes_09_03_01.html:
Add minutes for the mercury meetings on 2/3 and 9/3.
Index: news/reportsdb.inc
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/mercury1/repository/w3/news/reportsdb.inc,v
retrieving revision 1.15
diff -u -r1.15 reportsdb.inc
--- news/reportsdb.inc 2001/02/19 15:38:17 1.15
+++ news/reportsdb.inc 2001/03/12 12:23:34
@@ -12,6 +12,10 @@
*/
$reportsdb = array(
+ "9 March 2001" =>
+ array("minutes_09_03_01.html", "Mercury Meeting Minutes"),
+ "2 March 2001" =>
+ array("minutes_02_03_01.html", "Mercury Meeting Minutes"),
"16 Feb 2001" =>
array("minutes_16_02_01.html", "Mercury Meeting Minutes"),
"9 Feb 2001" =>
Index: information/reports/minutes_02_03_01.html
===================================================================
RCS file: minutes_02_03_01.html
diff -N minutes_02_03_01.html
--- /dev/null Fri Mar 2 14:16:41 2001
+++ minutes_02_03_01.html Mon Mar 12 23:19:38 2001
@@ -0,0 +1,146 @@
+
+<html>
+
+<pre>
+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 (rejj) Jeschofnik's 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 (zs) Somogyi 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
+ (dgj) Jeffery 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.)
+ - part way to fixing a performance bug in deforestation.
+
+ Thomas Conway (conway)
+
+ - has been working on his thesis.
+ - collaborated with Zoltan (zs) Somogyi 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 (fjh) Henderson pertaining to
+ a serious bug.
+
+
+3. Administrative Matters:
+
+ - Zoltan (zs) Somogyi complained about the frequency of the emails
+ requesting bug fixes. The present frequency is one email per bug per
+ day. After some debate, Fergus (fjh) Henderson 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 (stayl) Taylor agreed to see to
+ the file systems, David (dmo) Overton agreed to see to the software.
+
+4. General Matters:
+
+ - Fergus and Zoltan 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. The 0.10 Release:
+
+ - The 0.10 release has proceeded, with an announcement on
+ mercury-announce.
+ - Fergus 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).
+</pre>
+</html>
Index: information/reports/minutes_09_03_01.html
===================================================================
RCS file: minutes_09_03_01.html
diff -N minutes_09_03_01.html
--- /dev/null Fri Mar 2 14:16:41 2001
+++ minutes_09_03_01.html Mon Mar 12 23:19:03 2001
@@ -0,0 +1,152 @@
+
+<html>
+
+<pre>
+We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri March 9, 2001.
+
+Attendees:
+ Tyson Dowd (trd)
+ Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
+ Thomas Conway (conway)
+ David Overton (dmo)
+ Fergus Henderson (fjh)
+ Mark Brown (dougl)
+ Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell)
+ Simon Taylor (stayl)
+
+1. General Business
+
+ - Zoltan has submitted the final version of the ARC discovery
+ project grant application.
+
+ - Zoltan, Fergus and Tyson will be in Seattle from 17-26
+ March.
+
+ - Zoltan suggested that the pseudoknot benchmark (Fergus has a
+ Mercury implementation) and the Mercury version of 'error'
+ should be added to the distribution.
+
+ - There was a discussion of the need for a Windows machine for
+ testing the Windows and .Net distributions.
+
+ - VMWare considered a bit inconvenient because of its
+ memory usage.
+
+ - Dual booting a machine also inconvenient.
+
+ - Decided that Zoltan's old laptop, Traveller, will be
+ chained to a desk and run Windows so that anyone who
+ needs it can use it.
+
+ - Tom asked for a status report on the accurate garbage
+ collector. Tyson and Fergus responded:
+
+ - It needs a lot of testing.
+
+ - Does not yet handle foreign code which handles
+ Mercury data structures.
+
+ - Has suffered software rot with respect to changes in
+ the RTTI data structures.
+
+ - Does not yet handle closures properly.
+
+ - Does not yet handle existential types properly.
+
+ - Will need performance tuning and perhaps even a
+ redesign of the algorithm.
+
+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.
+
+ Tyson Dowd (trd)
+
+ - Arrived home from India without having contracted
+ cholera.
+
+ - In addition to travelling to Seattle this month, he
+ will be in Cambridge from 17/4 to 11/5 and may then
+ spend some time in Belgium visiting Mission
+ Critical.
+
+ - Built a Debian package of 0.10.0.
+
+ Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
+
+ - Found a bug in deep profiling after 10 days of
+ debugging.
+
+ - Two new optimisations implemted for the LLDS back
+ end which will hopefully replace value numbering.
+ Still needs to benchmark to work out when these
+ optimisations should be turned on.
+
+ Thomas Conway (conway)
+
+ - Has been tracking down the deep profiling bug with
+ Zoltan.
+
+ - Has been writing up his thesis.
+
+ - Has been benchmarking independent 'and' parallelism
+ (&).
+
+ - Produced a histogram of sizes of allocated cells in
+ the compiler.
+
+ - From next week will be back at MDS Mondays to
+ Thursdays. Will be writing up his thesis on Fridays
+ -- mostly at home, but may come in to the office
+ occasionally.
+
+ David Overton (dmo)
+
+ - Has been debugging the new mode checker to get a set
+ of benchmarks working.
+
+ Fergus Henderson (fjh)
+
+ - Has been attempting to move expansion of equivalence
+ types to a later stage of compilation, but has been
+ having problems since some phases need to know the
+ original type and others need to know the expanded
+ type. Zoltan suggested doing the expansion early,
+ but keeping both types around so that different
+ passes can use whichever they need.
+
+ - Has been fixing a reported bug where the compiler
+ aborts with a software error if a program contains a
+ higher-order term without mode and determinism
+ declarations. Will change the code to give a nice
+ error message instead.
+
+ - Found a bug in the Component Pascal type system
+ which means they will need to do a bit of a redesign
+ of their language to make it verifiably safe in
+ .Net.
+
+ Mark Brown (dougle)
+
+ - Has started his new top secret job and has been
+ reading the CLI spec from Microsoft.
+
+ - Has setup CVS pserver on Venus.
+
+ Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell)
+
+ - Has been debugging his work on sequence
+ quantification.
+
+ Simon Taylor (stayl)
+
+ - Has been fixing bugs and reading background
+ material.
+
+
+Minutes taken by David Overton (dmo at cs.mu.oz.au).
+
+</pre>
+</html>
--
David Overton Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
PhD Student The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
+61 3 8344 9159 http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~dmo
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