MPS issue job001158

Titlevariety design does not meet requirements of open-source MPS
Statusclosed
Priorityessential
Assigned userRichard Kistruck
OrganizationRavenbrook
Descriptionvariety design does not meet requirements of open-source MPS.
Now MPS is open-source, perhaps we should ship internal varieties with debug symbols; or with debug symbols for the open-source parts anyway.
AnalysisRelated jobs:
  job001248 (source clarity) Badly named CHECK macros in config.h...

Historical related jobs:
  job001157 [INVALID] variety white-hot has asserts
  job000534 checking varieties don't
  job001545 hot varieties still don't
  job001546 hot varieties gather stats!

RHSK 2005-10-21
Note: "old" means the variety and check system present before 2005-10. This job implements the "new" design.

The old variety design, and check design, attempt to re-encode the fundamental possibilities into a prepackaged, easy to use 'menu', but based on decisions that are out of date. Time to go back to the fundamentals and rethink.

Meta-note: And don't think we'll get it 'right' this time either. Keep it simple. Don't pre-purchase flexibility at the cost of cheap future adaptability.

3 fundamental areas of choice for a variety:

Code-generation. Approximately a spectrum, the extremes are:
  - Full Debug (easy for a source code debugger to use);
  - Fully Optimised.

Checks written in source code. Very flexible, not a simple spectrum*, and under our control. Partly a variety issue, partly dynamically adjustable at run-time. Effectiveness of checking is a huge factor in reliability and productivity. A vague idea of requirements will produce a bad checking model. We need proper use cases, to get proper reqs, to get a system that gives excellent support for dev and maint. (*: viz: ci, ti, ii, yuk!).

Stripping. Commercial clients may require symbols to be stripped. This remains a requirement even though we also provide open-source copies of MPS. (This is the old "External" as opposed to "Internal" distinction).
How foundunknown
EvidenceRaw notes from Configura workshop <http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2005/02/28/12-40-49/0.txt>.
Observed in1.105.0
Created byRichard Kistruck
Created on2005-03-10 03:23:00
Last modified byRichard Brooksby
Last modified on2012-09-21 20:42:27
History2005-03-10 RHSK create
2005-10-21 RHSK Analysis: 3 fundamental areas of choice for a variety.
2006-12-13 RHSK Note more related jobs.

Fixes

Change Effect Date User Description
179279 closed 2012-09-05 18:44:44 Richard Brooksby Merging branch/2012-08-15/variety-reform.