[Gcl-devel] Recent HEAD changes

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Camm.

I've been keen to try out your new optimisations to GCL.  I'm running
through those changes you've been making over the past few days and thought
you might like to hear some comments from the Windows perspective.

HEAD doesn't configure or run on Windows as a result of those changes.  I've
made some local changes to help this situation but have some questions in
addition to those comments all of which are set out below.

1. Your newly checked in test for the TYPE_BITS macro causes a fatal end to
the configuration script.

2. I'm getting a negative CSTACK_ADDRESS -2147483648

3. Are these sensible values?

  #define CSTACK_TOP 0x80000000
  #define CSTACK_RANGE 0x40000000

4. What are these macros meant to represent?

  SHARED_LIB_HEAP_CEILING
  IM_FIX_BASE 0x80000000
  IM_FIX_LIM 0x40000000

  (Perhaps some comments in "h/gclincl.h" would help?)
  There is no "ldd" on Windows so the shared lib heap ceiling test is
meaningless.   DLLs are loaded above the main program text etc and below the
heap.

5. On Windows, the C stack lives below the program text, data and heap and
its size defaults to CSSIZE 1073741824 but can currently be altered by
configure to some other value as required.

6. The Lisp heap start is normally hard-wired by our configuration script to
start at DBEGIN =  0x1a000000.  I am thinking that I could lower that start
point or just remove it altogether - the heap start address can be altered
automatically as the system tries to grab heap memory anyway according to
whether it succeeds in getting the blocks it asks for.  How this would
affect unexec I am uncertain at this stage.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.