SML/NJ 110.37 NEWS
Author: Matthias Blume
Description: working release announcement for SML/NJ

# S M L / N J 1 1 0 . 37 N E W S

November 23, 2001
WARNING This version is intended for compiler hackers. The version ought to be stable, however we have not run our full regression testing. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/smlnj/index.html

### Summary:

- Improvements to the MLRISC backend.
- Enhanced export-list syntax for .cm-files.
- Various assorted bug fixes and improvements to other components and subsystems.

### Details:

##### MLRISC:

- Implemented a complete redesign of MLRISC pseudo-ops. Now there ought to never be any question of incompatabilities with pseudo-op syntax expected by host assemblers. For now, only modules supporting GAS syntax are implemented but more should follow, such as MASM, and vendor assembler syntax, e.g. IBM as, Sun as, etc. The new pseudo-ops design is used to add a string to the end of the code stream that represents the file name.
- Fix for a backpatching bug reported by Allen. Because the boundary between short and long span-dependent instructions is +/- 128, there are an astounding number of span-dependent instructions whose size is over estimated. Allen came up with the idea of letting the size of span dependent instructions be non-monotonic, for a maxIter number of times, after which the size must be monotonically increasing. This table shows the number of span-dependent instructions whose size was over-estimated as a function of maxIter, for the file Parse/parse/ml.grm.sml:

  maxIter | # of instructions
  10 | 687
  20 | 438
  30 | 198
  40 | 0

- In compiling the compiler, there is no significant difference in compilation speed between maxIter=10 and maxIter=40. Actually, my measurements showed that maxIter=40 was a tad faster than maxIter=10! Also 96% of the files in the compiler reach a fix point within 13 iterations, so fixing maxIter at 40, while high, is okay.
- Fixed the bug described in blume-20010920-slowfp. The fix involves

1. generating FCOPYs in FSTP in ia32-svid
2. marking a CALL with the appropriate annotation

- (x86-fast-fp is still off by default.)
- X86RA now uses a valid (instead of dummy) PrintFlowgraph module.
- The representation of a program point never expected to see more than 65536 instructions in a basic block! Fixed.

##### CM

- avoid "/../" in filenames as much as possible (but only where it is safe)
- experimental implementation of "portable graphs" (See the proposal in http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/blume/pgraph/proposal.pdf for details on portable library graphs.)
- there are also new libraries $/pgraph.cm and $/pgraph-util.cm
- CM now implements a simple "set calculus" for specifying export lists. In particular, it is now possible to refer to the export lists of other libraries/groups/sources and form unions as well as differences. See the latest CM manual for details.
- A separate notion of "proxy" libraries has been eliminated from CM's model. (Proxy libraries are now simply a special case of using the export list calculus.)

##### compiler

- routed the name of the current source file to mlriscgen where it gets directly emitted into the code object (This uses the new pseudo-op infrastructure of MLRISC.)

##### runtime:

- Underscore patch from Chris Richards (fixing problem with compiling runtime system under recent NetBSD).
- Removed handling of code object name strings from runtime code. (The only remaining code-name-string-related code in the runtime is for extracting/reading of same.)

##### CKIT:

- Changed the "Function" constructor of type Ast.ctype to carry optional argument identifiers.
- Changed the return type of TypeUtil.getFunction accordingly.
- Type equality ignores the argument names.
- TypeUtil.composite tries to preserve argument names but gives up quickly if there is a mismatch.

##### installation script:

- attempts to use "curl" if available (unless "wget" is available as well)
- put relative anchor names for tool commands into pathconfig

##### run script:

- Changed config/_run-sml (resulting in a changed bin/.run-sml) so that arguments that contain delimiters are passed through correctly. This change also means that all "special" arguments of the form @SMLxxx... must come first.

##### NLFFI-LIB:

- some cleanup (all cosmetic)

##### NLFFIGEN:

- temporarily disabled the mechanism that suppresses ML output for C definitions whose identifiers start with an underscore character
- generate val bindings for enum constants
- user can request that only one style (light or heavy) is being used; default is to use both (command-line arguments: -heavy and -light)
- fixed bug in handling of function types involving incomplete pointers
- generate ML entry points that take record arguments (i.e., using named arguments) for C functions that have a prototype with named arguments (see changes to CKIT)

##### Basis implementation:

- provided a non-hook implementation of exnName (at the toplevel) and made the "dummy" implementation of exnMessage (at the toplevel) more useful: if nothing gets "hooked in", then at least you are going to see the exception name and a message indicating why you don't see more.

- [For the time being, programs that need exnMessage and want to use ml-build should either use General.exnMessage (strongly recommended) or refer to structure General at some other point so that CM sees a static dependency.]

- [Similar remarks go for "print" and "use": If you want to use their functionality in stand-alone programs generated by ml-build, then use TextIO.output and Backend.Interact.useFile (from $smlnj/compiler.cm)

##### ml-yacc/ml-lex/ml-burg:

- Don't use "exnMessage" -- use "General.exnMessage"! (see "Basis implementation")

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