BrianScheme Update: Bootstrapping and Images

I previously talked about BrianScheme (BS) and we've had some exciting updates since then. I've since caught up with Brian so we're committing code at about the same rate. It's really coming together to be something bigger than we both expected. We're adding what we feel is the best of Common List and Scheme. The Git repository log reveals just how much time we've spent hacking at this.

The first big milestone was full bootstrapping. BS has both an interpreter, written in C, and a compiler written in BS. The compiler targets a VM, which is written in C. The interpreter is no longer used directly; it's there simply for bootstrapping the compiler. It sets up an initial environment, then loads and runs the compiler which immediately compiles itself, and then compiles its environment, and then compiles the main user environment. Afterward the whole thing is lifted up on top of the VM and the interpreter is abandonded.

Once everything was bootstrapped and running in the VM, continuations became a practical possibility, and Brian soon added them. So now BrianScheme now has all the major components of a Scheme.

I began ramping up my contributions by adding a really solid random number generator, the Mersenne twister, and providing functions to generate numbers on all sorts of distributions: normal, Poisson, gamma, exponential, beta, and Chi-squared. It's pretty reasonable at seeding itself, too.

In the meantime, this bootstrap process, while incredibly useful, was really slowing down development. It was taking BS about 10 seconds to boot itself every time it was started. That can really kill the usefulness of the system. I started to look into ways to mitigate this, perhaps through FASLs or some kind of image dump.

After discussing it with Brian I decided to try for a memory dump, SBCL-style. My old memory pool allocator, which I thought I've never use again, really came in handy, and now has a home — modified of course — in BS. It no longer uses malloc(), instead using mmap() to get more memory, and now has the ability to free() memory, completely replacing malloc(), realloc(), and free(). So with BrianScheme no longer use the libc allocator we had complete control over the program's memory. It was just a matter of dumping the handful of big mmap() chunks to disk, and in another process, loading them back in to the same location, and finally hooking the environment back up.

Just as the SBCL documentation warns about, there are complicated issues still to be resolved (and may never be). The two big ones are alien objects and open file handles, neither of which can make it into the image. Aliens could be in there potentially, if the foreign library let us select its allocator. Brian made a change that gives the FFI a hook to rebind its symbols after load, so some of the FFI can survive the jump. The three stdin, stdout, and stderr file handles are reconnected on load, but the old, dead handles can potentially linger in places, waiting to cause errors when someone tries to read them.

It was really, really exciting to see the images come back to life for the first time. With that success the lengthy bootstrap process was no longer a big problem because it could be bypassed much of the time. Saving images is really simple to do, too.

(save-image "brianscheme.img")

This will create the image "brianscheme.img", which can be loaded again later with the -l switch. Once loaded, it will either execute a script if given one on the command line, or it will provide a new REPL. Because the image is mmapp()ed into place, loading is practically instantaneous, even if the image is dozens of megabytes (which can happen easily).

bsch -l brianscheme.img

The BS image in its booted state is about 15MB right now on 64-bit systems, and 7MB on 32-bit systems. They are low entropy and compress down to about 2MB, so it's not too bad. If you write a large program in BrianScheme and save it as an image it may be even larger.

Over the weekend I took this even further, continuing to follow in the footsteps of SBCL: I added a feature to wrap the image in the BS executable, so that the image itself is a standalone executable. To make this more useful, a toplevel function can be selected to run after the image loads, rather than a REPL. If you wrote a game in BS and wanted to compile to a standalone program,

(load "my-game.sch")
(save-image "my-game" 'executable #t 'toplevel play-my-game)

The user would execute the file my-game, which would load BS and run the function play-my-game. Because a 15MB binary is a little unwieldy to hand out, you could compress it beforehand with a tool like gzexe, which transparently compresses an executable.

The wrapper is actually very simple. It's a very slightly modified BS executable, padded out to the system's page size (4kB, generally), ending with a special marker. The image is concatenated to this binary. When run, the program scans itself looking for the marker (0xdeadbeef), and then mmap()s the portion behind it (you can only mmap() page-size offsets, which is why padding was necessary).

BrianScheme should have an interesting future ahead of it.

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Chris Wellons

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