[Openmcl-devel] RDNZL in CCL: Exception occurred while executing foreign code

[John Miller]

All,

On a wild hair, it seemed like it might be useful to have CCL running on my Windows XP 32-bit machine at work and use it to access Excel and Outlook using Dr. Edi Weitz's RDNZL (http://weitz.de/rdnzl/) package.  Doing this has turned out to be more difficult than I thought.  I built the FFI portion of the code using CFFI to look as close as possible to the FFI interfaces defined for the other lisps.

For some things the FFI works.  For example:

? (make-type-from-name "System.Reflection.Assembly")
#<CONTAINER System.Type #x1532E08>
? (import-assembly "mscorlib")
#<CONTAINER System.Reflection.Assembly #x1532EA8>

But if I try to get fancy:

? (import-types "System.Windows.Forms" "MessageBox")
%eax = 0x00faf00c
%ecx = 0x00000000
%edx = 0x00000002
%ebx = 0x79f7697c
%esp = 0x00faf008
%ebp = 0x00faf05c
%esi = 0x00faf094
%edi = 0x0040a958
%eip = 0x7c812a6b
%eflags = 0x00000206

%cs = 0x001b
%ds = 0x0023
%ss = 0x0023
%es = 0x0023
%fs = 0x003b
%gs = 0x0000
Exception on foreign stack

Exception occurred while executing foreign code
? for help
[2068] Clozure CL kernel debugger: t
Current Thread Context Record (tcr) = 0x5cbc20
Control (C) stack area:  low = 0xdb0000, high = 0xfb0000
Value (lisp) stack area: low = 0xfb0000, high = 0x0
Exception stack pointer = 0xfaf008
[2068] Clozure CL kernel debugger: b
current thread: tcr = 0x5cbc20, native thread ID = 0xde4, interrupts enabled


(#x010C0CD0) #x08D52435 : #<Function %INVOKE-STATIC-MEMBER #x08D52266> + 463
(#x010C0D14) #x08D794D5 : #<Function INVOKE #x08D7854E> + 3975
(#x010C0D78) #x08DD281D : #<Function IMPORT-TYPES #x08DD27CE> + 79
(#x010C0D88) #x0839E9BD : #<Function CALL-CHECK-REGS #x0839E8C6> + 247
(#x010C0DA4) #x083A8FE5 : #<Function TOPLEVEL-EVAL #x083A8CFE> + 743
(#x010C0DE8) #x083AAA35 : #<Function READ-LOOP #x083AA30E> + 1831
(#x010C0EFC) #x0839E60D : #<Function TOPLEVEL-LOOP #x0839E5C6> + 71
(#x010C0F04) #x0834222D : #<Function (:INTERNAL (TOPLEVEL-FUNCTION (LISP-DEVELOP
MENT-SYSTEM T))) #x083421CE> + 95
(#x010C0F14) #x0840FDED : #<Function (:INTERNAL MAKE-MCL-LISTENER-PROCESS) #x08$
0FBA6> + 583
(#x010C0F60) #x083484DD : #<Function RUN-PROCESS-INITIAL-FORM #x0834823E> + 671
(#x010C0FA4) #x08348E7D : #<Function (:INTERNAL (%PROCESS-PRESET-INTERNAL (PROCE
SS))) #x08348D2E> + 335
(#x010C0FCC) #x083317A5 : #<Function (:INTERNAL THREAD-MAKE-STARTUP-FUNCTION) #x
0833168E> + 279
[2068] Clozure CL kernel debugger:

Note that I can get RDNZL to work fine using CLISP 2.48 on this same machine.  

I believe part of the problem with CCL is that Edi's C++ code will throw a C++ exception under certain conditions (though I can't figure out why the above call to %invoke-static-member is causing an exception).  Other Lisp's seem to handle this without going into the kernel debugger.  For example with Clisp 2.48 running on the same machine

RDNZL[36]> (property "System.Reflection.Assembly" "FullName")

*** - .NET error (System.Exception): Static property not found:
       System.Reflection.Assembly->FullName

Trying to call property with the same arguments in CCL bumps me into the kernel debugger.  Again, I am not 100% convinced this is the problem, but I am not sure how to interpret the output from the debugger and come up with a better hypothesis of what is happening.

Best regards,
John Miller