Re: [Chicken-users] Generating C

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

A followup...

On 8 Jul 2016, at 19:46, Norman Gray wrote:

> "/Data/tools/chicken-4.11.0/bin/csc" -t -unit db -optimize-level 3 
> -include-path ../.. -emit-all-import-libraries -output-file db.c 
> ../../db.scm
[...]
> [panic] nursery is too small - try higher setting using the `-:s' 
> option - execution terminated
>
>
> Error: shell command terminated with non-zero exit status 256: 
> '/Data/tools/chicken-4.11.0/bin/chicken' '../../db.scm' -output-file 
> 'db.c' -unit db -optimize-level 3 -include-path ../.. 
> -emit-all-import-libraries

This seems to have fixed itself, without me doing anything I'm aware of 
to fix it.

It _appears_ to be something to do with module resolution, even though 
the error message is '[panic] nursery is too small' rather than anything 
about imports.  I suspect that because when I was trying to work out 
what was going on, I was as a side-effect re-generating other modules.  
I therefore can't reproduce the problem.

So I can now generate .c files.  I can't compile them (more module 
resolution problems), but I can generate them.

> The documentation at 
> <http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Using%20the%20compiler> is perhaps a 
> trifle laconic, and saying 'This is naturally rather simplistic' 
> doesn't really fill in the blanks.
>
> One useful thing to mention on that page would be that when compiling 
> modules, '-t -unit <modulename>' is necessary, otherwise we get 
> (intelligible in eventual retrospect) duplicate symbols when 
> compiling.  Inspection of c-backend.scm solved that particular puzzle.
>
> The build system, based on Makefile.* and *.make files, seems quite 
> narrowly targeted for the case of building Chicken itself.  The 
> experiments I've tried suggest that it can be adapted to building an 
> assembly of .c files, when I get them, but it needs a bit of hacking 
> for that case, and feels a bit wild-west.  Is that really the 
> recommended technique?
>
> It would be seriously useful if chicken-install, for example, could 
> work out the recursive set of dependencies for a particular source 
> file, and print them in a reusable way.  I wrote quite a lot of a tool 
> to do this, and to generate a Makefile which would assemble a kit and 
> prepare to build it.  However it started to acquire more and more 
> special cases, and it became clear that it could never really work 
> reliably, given the freedom of action afforded to the contents of 
> <egg>.setup.  Given that chicken-install already has to deal with this 
> complication, would it be reasonable for it to gain an option to emit 
> the dependencies, ideally in the form of a Makefile?
>
> I still have the impression that the ability to generate distributable 
> C is a key feature of Chicken (is this true?), which makes it odd that 
> this is documented only in a few dozen lines at the bottom of the 
> 'Using the compiler' page, and odd that an apparently simple build -- 
> I'm not doing anything exotic -- is quite this difficult, and requires 
> quite so much use of the source (Luke).  Have I (as happens so often) 
> got the wrong end of the stick?

Best wishes,

Norman


--
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK