[racket-dev] Release for v5.0.2 has begun

Matthew, would it make more sense to have unsafe-vector-ref (and related
functions) be the more general function and unsafe-vector*-ref be the one
that doesn't work  on chaperoned vectors? That is just swap the definitions.
That way user code that is already using unsafe-vector-ref (etc) will
continue to work.

As it stands, existing code that has unsafe-vector-ref (etc) will often
still work (in the sense of not getting any error or crashing), but just
gives the wrong results. For example, if you run science-test.ss from the
examples directory in the science collection, there are no errors. But, some
of the answers are wrong - for example the very first one, the gamma
function. [In other cases, like the FFT routines, there are either run-time
errors or crashes.]

Anyway, if it isn't too late, I think swapping the definitions would make
more sense and be safer.

Doug

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

> At Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:48:20 -0700, John Clements wrote:
> >
> > On Oct 20, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Doug Williams wrote:
> >
> > > I downloaded the pre-release version this morning - 10/20 (I believe it
> was
> > a build from 10/16). The plot package and plot extensions in the science
> > collection all work as expected. But, I am getting different numeric
> answers
> > for some of my science collection routines (for example, the gamma
> function)
> > and some of my newer code (for example, FFT) either fails with an error
> > message or DrRacket just dies. All of this code uses unsafe operations
> and the
> > problem may lie there somewhere. I'll try digging more deeply this
> evening.
> >
> > Focus first on uses of unsafe-vector-ref and unsafe-vector-set!. (Not the
> fx
> > and fl variants, just the plain ones).  I wound up removing these from
> the FFT
> > code in order to get it to work.
> >
> > Check out bug PR 11264.
> >
> > Also, very late flash of insight: my response (getting rid of
> > unsafe-vector-ref and unsafe-vector-set!) might explain my performance
> issues
> > with the FFT library.
>
> Overall, keep in mind that changes to vector contracts mean that
> vectors can be wrapped with chaperones. That's why `unsafe-vector-ref'
> may need to change to `unsafe-vector*-ref', and it may explain
> performance differences in general.
>
>
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