[Openmcl-devel] bogus objects

[Cyrus Harmon]

On Nov 13, 2004, at 6:51 PM, Gary Byers wrote:
> In the current case using a string stream incidentally (for (FORMAT 
> NIL ...))
> means that you cons up a stream object and a string or two that may
> become garbage. I don't think that adding a lock to each string stream
> is desirable (the OS would have to be involved in the creation and
> destruction of that lock), though it may be possible to defer the OS's
> involvement to the (hopefully rare) case where there's some actual
> contention involved.  I'd have to think about that a bit more.
>
> If the shared string-output-streams that Araneida creates are basically
> "permanent", it might be practical to:
>
> a) create a corresponding lock for each global shared string stream
> b) ensure that any code which accesses such a shared stream grabs
>    the corresponding lock before doing so.

using ccl::make-lock and ccl::with-lock-grabbed seem to have 
ameliorated the problem. I'm not convinced there aren't more gotchas 
lurking, but I think the one I was seeing was due to multiple threads 
trying to write to a global error stream at roughly the same time.

> If that -is- practical, I suspect that you'll see the memory corruption
> go away.  (I'm relieved that this doesn't seem to be a GC problem.)
>
> If it isn't practical, please let me know and I'll try to talk to
> Dan Barlow about it

I'm pretty new to all this CL threading stuff. It would be great if 
there were a portable way to do this kind of locking.

Any nice tools for checking memory integrity I should know about?

Thanks again!

Cyrus