CHICKEN Scheme

Summary

Development process problem: the self-dependency loop in the compiler is too tight

Metadata

Id: 1c84062cf79a5278a183a52d315a4fee52443373
Trac id: 709
Type: defect
Reporter: johnwcowan
Owner:
Cc:
Status: closed
Component: compiler
Estimated difficulty:
Resolution: worksforme
Priority: major
Milestone: 4.9.0
Version: 4.7.x
Changetime: 2012-09-24 21:47:48 UTC
Created: 2011-10-03 01:05:36 UTC
Keywords:

Today I tried to recompile the current head after a `make confclean`, and found that my copy of `chicken` dating from 2011-09-21 (11 days old) was unable to compile it, because it did not understand the specialization type `input-port`. It's reasonable to add a new specialization type. It's not reasonable to change the source to depend on it at the same time. Now I'm stuck: until there is a new release tarball from which I can get an up-to-date `chicken`, I can't rebuild my system.

I see several possibilities here.

1. Use a new branch for fast-changing but un-bypassable features like specialization.  I am basically in favor of doing all development on trunk, but because Chicken builds depend so delicately on Chicken builds, some concessions may have to be made.

2. Have a switch to disable optimizations like this -- I tried setting `optimize-level` to 0 in `defaults.make`, but it didn't help.

3. As a matter of social engineering, make sure to bump the minimal version number every time a backward incompatibility like this happens, and issue a release tarball.  At present the latest tarball is 4.7.2, so old as to be useless with trunk.