Upon changing the 3 occurrences of make-hash in lang-core.rkt to make-hasheq, the demos/ animations begin to animate. At this moment, and after rolling back an earlier commit to lang-core.rkt, all of the demos in the demos folder are now working! Thank you for this fix Gregory! My goal was to perform a basic migration here-use Racket lang everywhere, excise as many mzlib dependencies as possible while still maintaining functionality. At this point, I consider this goal met-all of the demos are functioning, the language now extends racket vs. scheme or mzscheme. The scribble is updated to reflect this change. I am interested in having these changes incorporated into a future Racket release. How can I go about having these changes reviewed and merged into some development branch? I'm of course willing to work with someone to ensure that any blockers are resolved. Thank you all, -Patrick <div class="gmail_quote">On 18 August 2012 01:57, Gregory Cooper <<a href="mailto:ghcooper@gmail.com" target="_blank">ghcooper@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> If you change the 3 occurrences of make-hash in lang-core.rkt to make-hasheq, does that not fix things? That seems to work for me, though it's possible my setup is not quite the same... Greg <div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Gregory Cooper <<a href="mailto:ghcooper@gmail.com">ghcooper@gmail.com</a>> wrote: > Hi Patrick, > > Thanks for taking on this endeavor, and apologies for the suffering > you must have endured in dealing with this code. > > If I followed your instructions correctly, it looks like things are > very close to working. One feature that seems to be broken is the > storing of references to special top-level signals (which perform > actions like redrawing animations or updating snips) to protect them > from the garbage collector. It's been a while since I've looked at > this code, but I'll try to investigate a bit more and see what might > be going wrong. > > Cheers, > Greg > > On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:51 PM, Patrick Mahoney > <<a href="mailto:paddy.mahoney@gmail.com">paddy.mahoney@gmail.com</a>> wrote: >> Hello All, >> >> I have been working on updating the frtime collection to use the Racket lang >> rather than the mzscheme language. To this end, I forked on github and >> created a new branch frtime-to-racket, which can be found at: >> <a href="https://github.com/paddymahoney/racket.git" target="_blank">https://github.com/paddymahoney/racket.git</a> >> >> This branch contains 36 commits. The first 34 are minor, and don't actually >> break functionality. See the commit log: >> <a href="https://github.com/paddymahoney/racket/commits/frtime-to-racket" target="_blank">https://github.com/paddymahoney/racket/commits/frtime-to-racket</a> >> >> The 35th commit is bigger, and represents the bulk of the move of the >> collection and the other main modules to the racket lang rather than >> mzscheme. The issue I face is that this commit is breaking all of the demos >> within the frtime/demos/ subdirectory. These demos rely on animation.rkt at >> the root. The demos in the frtime/gui/demo directory don't depend on >> animation.rkt, and seem to work, albeit with a slow asynchronous perhaps? >> (perhaps some subset of the issues affecting the animation demos also affect >> the demos relying only on the fred wrappers). >> >> The 36th commit is a new helper "develop-frtime.rkt" which I use to unlink >> the install collection and link the development frtime collection. >> >> I have very closely reviewed all the changes in the commit logs, and have >> played around extensively to try to find a particular change that has the >> effect of breaking the animations, to no avail. >> >> My uneducated guesses as to what is occurring: >> 1. The behavior seen in running the demos is that they will typically >> update for a few frames or seconds, but then freeze in place. A similar >> issue is described in Gregory Cooper's thesis "Integrating Dataflow >> Evaluation into a Practical >> Higher-Order Call-by-Value Language". From page 99: >> "There is, however, a problem with the strategy described above that is >> difficult to di-agnose and debug. The symptoms are as follows: at first, the >> program seems to work just >> fine. Sometimes it may run successfully to completion. Other times, >> depending upon what >> else is happening, it runs for a while, then suddenly and seemingly without >> explanation the >> gauge’s properties stop updating when the behaviors change. The point at >> which it stops >> varies from run to run, but there are never any error messages. >> The problem results from an interaction with the memory manager. An ordinary >> FRP >> application would use the event source returned by the map-e, but in this >> case we only >> care about side effects, so we neglect to save the result. Since there are >> no references to >> the updating event source, the garbage collector eventually reclaims it, and >> the gauge stops >> reacting to changes in the behavior. >> To avoid these problems, we define a new abstraction specifically for >> side-effecting >> event processors. This abstraction, called for-each-e!, works just like >> map-e, except that it >> ensures its result will not be collected. It also lends itself to a more >> efficient implementa-tion, since it can throw away the results of the >> procedure calls instead of enqueuing them >> on a new event stream." >> >>> this seems very much like what I see in the behavior of say, >>> "demos/analog-clock.rkt". You are often able to force an update by dragging >>> the clock or updating the slider, and occasionally the clock will tick in >>> the beginning. In addition, sometimes the clock won't show initially (this >>> may occur when there is a difference in the way the dataflow graph is >>> updated?). However, I have been unsuccessful in determining whether this is >>> in fact the case, or if there a distinct issue here with similar symptoms. >>> In fact, I don't know what is occurring at all, and I am at a loss as to how >>> to resolve this problem. >> >> 2. Something isn't being lifted. >>> I have run Check Syntax and traced most of the bindings to ensure that >>> lifted equivalents are being used everywhere. I can't find a binding that >>> was not lifted, but I cannot rule this out either. >>>Files that might be involved: >> lang-utils.rkt >> lang-core.rkt >> opt/frtime-opt-lang.rkt >> >> 3. Persuant to 1, garbage collection behavior/calls have changed, and the >> result is that some behavior is being collected prematurely. Interactions >> with mred usage and garbage collection might contribute if this is an issue. >> >> I have invested a ton of time into understanding enough to make even these >> minor changes, and really don't want to see this work die on the vine. So I >> open it to you Racket experts for help debugging this. >> >> Instructions to see the issue: >> Open a command line and: >>> git clone <a href="https://github.com/paddymahoney/racket.git" target="_blank">https://github.com/paddymahoney/racket.git</a> >> (you might want to do this in a different directory than that which holds >> another fork of racket) >>>git checkout frtime-to-racket >> Open the "racket/collects/frtime/develop-frtime.rkt" file in drracket and >> update the two paths. Run the function (start-developing-frtime) to ensure >> that the development rather than installation collection is used when we run >> the demos. If you don't, any collection paths will refer to the install >> directory, and you will receive errors. >> Open "racket/collects/frtime/demos/analog-clock.rkt. Run it. >> >> Please let me know if you require any further assistance reproducing this >> bug, and I will endeavor to provide. In addition, I will be extremely >> grateful for any assistance here. I'd like to attend the October RacketConf, >> and a beverage of some kind would be in order to reward my hero. >> >> Thank you all, >> >> -Patrick >> >> ____________________ >> Racket Users list: >> <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/users" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/users</a> >> </div></div></blockquote></div>