[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News
Alan Schmitt
alan.schmitt at polytechnique.org
Tue Nov 8 00:51:44 PST 2005
Hello,
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of 01 to 08
November, 2005.
1) The best way to circumvent the lack of Thread.kill ?
2) Camomile-0.6.3
3) otags 3.09.0 released
4) HDCaml 0.2.0
5) strftime/strptime and asctime
6) Enhanced Ocaml Documentation Version 3.09
7) Get a page from the Web
8) Sexplib - library for S-expression conversions
========================================================================
1) The best way to circumvent the lack of Thread.kill ?
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31022>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Julien Narboux asked:
I just encountered the Thread.kill "not implemented" exception.
A google search gives me this answer from Xavier Leroy on the caml
weekly news (<http://sardes.inrialpes.fr/~aschmitt/cwn/
2003.05.20.html>) :
"The general solution is to avoid using Thread.kill. Terminating
another
thread at arbitrary times is an inherently unsafe operation: the
killed thread may be holding mutexes, for instance. There's a good
explanation of the problems in the Java documentation:
<http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/misc/
threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html>
explaining why they "deprecated" their equivalent of Thread.kill."
Here is the relevant part of this web page :
"Most uses of stop should be replaced by code that simply modifies some
variable to indicate that the target thread should stop running. The
target thread should check this variable regularly, and return from its
run method in an orderly fashion if the variable indicates that it is to
stop running. (This is the approach that JavaSoft's Tutorial has always
recommended.) To ensure prompt communication of the stop-request, the
variable must be volatile (or access to the variable must be
synchronized)."
My problem is that I don't want to pollute my target thread with checks
for a variable.
Indeed, I am writing a graphical user interface for an automated theorem
prover.
I have a function f which decides if a theorem is true or not. It can
terminate quickly or take ages, and I want to have an "interrupt" button
in the graphical user interface so the user can stop the computation if
he wants to. I do not want to have GUI related code in the automated
theorem proving part of the program, it would not be clean imho.
What is the best solution ? start a new process and use the kill at the
operating system level ?
(to make things even worse I need something which works on linux,
windows and macosx)
** Richard Jones suggested, Julien Narboux said, and Jacques Garrigue
said:
Julien Narboux wrote:
> Richard Jones wrote:
> > How about forking off the theorem prover as a separate process?
You
> > can communicate the result back to the main program using either a
> > status code or a pipe (depending on how complex the result
structure
> > is). The interrupt button just kills the forked process.
>
> Yes, but the problem is that under the native windows port (see
> <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual035.html>) :
>
> "kill, pause not implemented (no inter-process signals in Windows)"
The workaround I found a long time ago is to embed a thread in the
forked process that waits for "signals" on a pipe.
If you look at byterun/startup.c and byterun/win32.c you will
see that it is started when there is a CAMLSIGPIPE in the environment.
This is used by otherlibs/labltk/browser/shell.ml on windows.
This already works on any bytecode application.
For native code, you could just link that bit of C code, and start it
by hand.
Another way to do it, which is used by ocamlwin, is to send SIGINT
through then win32 function GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent. But this will
just interrupt, not kill. And I didn't know that function at that
time...
** Gerd Stolpmann answered the OP:
> I just encountered the Thread.kill "not implemented" exception.
This operation is insane, better it would be removed entirely.
What could be worth of discussion is a Thread.send_exception that will
cause that a certain thread raises a certain exception the next time it
executes O'Caml code. This won't work if the thread is blocked, however.
(There is machinery to handle such asynchronous events in the O'Caml
runtime.)
For Unix (including MacOS X) you can implement send_exception yourself
by sending a signal to the thread, and defining a signal handler that
just raises an exception.
In Windows there are no signals. An extension of the O'Caml runtime
would be needed to get this behaviour.
> What is the best solution ? start a new process and use the kill
at the
> operating system level ?
Which is unavailable in Windows.
> (to make things even worse I need something which works on linux,
> windows and macosx)
There is a hack that works (Xavier forgive):
exception User_interrupt
let do_something() =
ignore(7 * 6)
;;
let compute() =
try
while true do
do_something()
done;
assert false
with
| User_interrupt ->
prerr_endline "Thread interrupted!"
;;
let vt_signal =
match Sys.os_type with
| "Win32" -> Sys.sigterm
| _ -> Sys.sigvtalrm
;;
let interrupt = ref None;;
let force_interrupt old_action_ref n =
(* This function is called just before the thread's timeslice ends *)
if Some(Thread.id(Thread.self())) = !interrupt then
raise User_interrupt;
match !old_action_ref with
| Sys.Signal_handle f -> f n
| _ -> failwith "Not in threaded mode"
;;
let main() =
(* Install the signal handler: *)
let old_action_ref = ref Sys.Signal_ignore in
let old_action =
Sys.signal vt_signal (Sys.Signal_handle (force_interrupt
old_action_ref)) in
old_action_ref := old_action;
(* Fire up the compute thread: *)
let t = Thread.create compute () in
(* Wait for user: *)
print_string "Press Return: ";
flush stdout;
let _ = read_line() in
interrupt := Some (Thread.id t);
(* Wait until the thread terminates: *)
Thread.join t
;;
main();;
** Gerd Stolpmann added:
> let do_something() =
> ignore(7 * 6)
> ;;
Just an addition: This function is too primitive for ocamlopt (it won't
check for pending events). Use
let rec do_something() =
ignore(7 * 6); flush stdout
;;
instead.
** David Teller said and Alessandro Baretta answered:
> I would have figured that the best way to properly kill a thread
would
> be to have some form of channel (i.e. Events.t)-based communication
> between threads -- and then killing the channel.
>
> Trouble is that, as I've just realized, there is no such facility as
> killing/sending an exception through a channel. Does anyone know
why ?
Event.channel is a type constructor which takes an argument identifying
the type of objects that are sent over the channel. You can send thunk
computations ((unit -> 'a) Event.channel), which may very well raise an
exception. Or you can simply send an exception (exn Event.channel).
Finally, you can send "()" on a channel (unit Event.channel), whose sole
purpose is to communicate soft-kill requests.
** David Teller then said and Alessandro Baretta answered:
> A (unit Event.channel) or a (exn Event.channel), combined with
> (Event.poll), or perhaps a simple (bool Event.channel), would indeed
> permit soft-killing a thread during a synchronization phase meant
> explicitly for that purpose. A thunk computation could even
generalize
> this to actual communications, at the price of a somewhat strange
type.
>
> However, in my mind, all these solutions are the channel
equivalent of
> manual error-handling -- something akin to a function returning an
('a
> option) instead of an 'a because the result None is reserved for
errors.
> I'm still slightly puzzled as to why this distant killing/raising
is not
> a core feature of channels. After all, unless I'm mistaken,
channels are
> a manner of implementing continuations. I tend to believe I should be
> able to raise an error (a hypothetical Event.raise/Event.kill)
instead
> of returning/passing a value (as in Event.send).
>
> Or did I miss something ?
"Channel" is maybe an inappropriate term for this strange object. An
Event.channel is more like a single-slot mailbox to pass a message to
someone. Any number of Threads (zero upwards) can be waiting for
messages on a channel. There is no obligation that there be exactly one
thread to kill on the other side. What would happen is try to send a
hard-kill event on a channel where there is nobody on the other side?
What if the there is more than one thread?
You are trying to find a way around killing a thread with Thread.kill,
but there is really no way to cleanly kill a thread asynchronously. A
clean exit requires some cooperation from the killed thread.
** David Teller then said:
Let me rephrase. I don't want to kill just any thread, I want to send an
exception to whoever is actually synchronising on a channel. Perhaps any
exception can be "distantly thrown", or perhaps only one specific kind.
Something like
let sender c =
ignore Event.sync (Event.send c 1);
(**Event.send passes an information,
while Event.sync may pass control.*)
ignore Event.sync (Event.send c 2);
ignore Event.sync (Event.send c 4);
ignore Event.sync (Event.kill c)
and receiver f c =
f Event.sync (Event.receive c);
(**Event.receive receive an information,
while Event.sync may pass control.*)
f Event.sync (Event.receive c);
f Event.sync (Event.receive c);
f Event.sync (Event.receive c);
(*Actually, this operation throws
Event.Closed_channel*)
f Event.sync (Event.receive c)
in
let c = Event.new_channel ()
in
ignore (Thread.create sender c);
try
receiver print_int c
with
x -> (*...*)
In the case of more than two threads waiting for communication on a
single channel, I would say that they all should receive the exception
during their next Event.sync.
I agree that this is quite close to your idea of sending thunk
functions, but the additional indirection strikes me as odd for
something which to me looks like a primitive.
========================================================================
2) Camomile-0.6.3
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31065>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Yoriyuki Yamagata announced:
I am pleased to announce Camomile-0.6.3, a comprehensive Unicode
library for OCaml. This release is to support OCaml 3.09. To reduce
the complexity of Makefile, the support for unpacked library is
dropped. Now, all modules in Camomile is under Camomile modules. So,
for example, UTF8 modules is accessed by the name Camomile.UTF8.
You can download Camomile-0.6.3 from
<http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/camomile/camomile-0.6.3.tar.bz2?
download>
By the way, I am in Italy(Turin) by January. Is there OCaml related
meeting(formal or informal)? I would glad to meet someone in Europe
who are interested in OCaml.
========================================================================
3) otags 3.09.0 released
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31071>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Hendrik Tews announced:
I would like to announce the release of otags version 3.09.0 for
ocaml 3.09.0. otags generates tags files for both emacs and
vi/vim from ocaml sources.
The new version is available at
<http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~tews/otags/otags-3.09.0.tar.gz>
The README file is online at
<http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~tews/otags/README>
NEW in this release:
- change of maintainer: the former maintainers Cuihtlauac
Alvarado and Jean-Francois Monin are not longer keen on
maintaining otags, so I took over.
- fixed native compilation of camlp4 extensions
- new option -no-mli-tags generates only one entry for every mli
file
- new options -bindir -libdir to set otags search path for
executables and camlp4 modules (most useful for automated
testing)
LICENCE: GPL 2
========================================================================
4) HDCaml 0.2.0
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31078>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Tom Hawkins announced:
HDCaml is a hardware description language embedded in OCaml. Given a
digital design in HDCaml, the tools will output a synthesizable Verilog
netlist with PSL assertions for verification.
Though HDCaml is still in early beta, 0.2 has undergone a major cleanup
of the API. All comments are welcome. To download...
<http://www.confluent.org/>
To generate the [undocumented] example...
> ocaml hdcaml.cma
Objective Caml version 3.09.0
# Hdcaml.Example.all_prims ();;
** Ray Heasman asked and Tom Hawkins answered:
> Is confluence still going to be around? I haven't used it for a few
> months, but I really liked it. I actually wrote useful stuff for
work in
> it. I stuck with an older version though, because I needed a
consistent
> environment.
It's not going to disappear, but I am no longer actively developing it.
However, I'm more than willing to fix the occasional bug.
>
>
>>Though HDCaml is still in early beta, 0.2 has undergone a major
cleanup
>>of the API. All comments are welcome. To download...
>>
>
> I have no experience with ocaml, though I intend to play some day. Is
> there any reason I should use HDCaml instead of confluence? Also,
I tend
> to prefer VHDL over verilog (I am a bondage-and-discipline
programmer),
I think you just answered your own question. Unlike Confluence, OCaml
has an excellent type system that catches a vast majority of bugs at
compile time. OCaml's type system is far stronger than that of C++,
Java, and even VHDL. And unlike these languages, OCaml's compiler is
smart enough to infer types automatically -- type declarations are
usually optional.
OCaml and Haskell programmers have an expression: "Once it compiles, it
usually just works!"
> so I am not overjoyed that HDCaml only does verilog.
The HDCaml Verilog generator is only 90 lines of code. In time, HDCaml
will write out VHDL, SystemC, and other popular netlist formats. Maybe
you would like to write the VHDL back-end? There is no better way to
learn a new language than writing a real application.
>
> I'm interested if you have some sort of game plan in mind. I started
> losing the plot when you moved to the FNF and generating stuff for
> verification tools. I have generally worked on small fry designs
> (largest has been 70000 gates) in a pretty informal FPGA
environment. I
> like the idea of verification, but I feel you are so far ahead of me
> that I don't even understand what you are trying to do anymore. An
> overview would be very very interesting to me.
The real benefit of HDCaml is that it is embedded in a real [powerful]
general purpose programming language. Most of the development tools are
already in place, including:
- Compiler (ocamlc)
- Interactive Interpreter (ocaml)
- Debugger (ocamldebug)
- Profiling (ocamlprof)
- Source Code Documentation Generator (ocamldoc)
- Standard Libraries (the basic data structures are all ready written)
The other benefit is, the language that describes hardware is the same
language that can analyze and transform hardware descriptions. What
kind of analysis and transformations are possible? Obviously, we need
some netlist generators (transforming the intermediate circuit
representation into VHDL). Here are a few other examples:
- Custom Reports
- How many flops, multipliers, and memories are in my design?
- Custom Lint Checks
- Does my circuit have any combinational loops?
- Custom Optimizations
- Remove all null effect logic in a circuit.
- Replace register enables with clock-gating.
- Circuit Visualization
- Writing the circuit to Graphviz dot.
- Manipulate the Design Hierarchy
- Expand or collapse design levels.
- Merge two asynchronous circuits.
- Rough timing estimation.
Most of these "plug-ins" are trivial, requiring only about 30-80 lines
of OCaml. We can take this a step further by starting to simulate and
verify circuits within OCaml. Here are some possibilities:
- Converting a circuit into a simulatable object.
- Stimulus generation.
- Directed testing.
- Constrained random. (Possibly another OCaml embedded language?)
- Co-simulate with real firmware. (OCaml can interface with C.)
- VCD generation. (We all like to look at waveforms.)
- Model checking.
- Automated theorem proving.
- HOL Light
- MetaPRL
In short, you'll have a unified environment for design and verification.
========================================================================
5) strftime/strptime and asctime
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31091>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Joshua Smith asked and Shawn Wagner answered:
> This has come up on the list before (even by me once), but
> I'm was wondering if anyone (like the maintainers) would have any
> interest in a patch to the 3.09 codebase to add strptime, strftime
and
> asctime? It would probably work in the 3.08 code, too, but I figure
> the most current version is the place to start.
All three of these functions are already in the annex library
(<http://raevnos.pennmush.org/code/annexlib/>), not that it wouldn't
be nice
to have them in the standard library too
========================================================================
6) Enhanced Ocaml Documentation Version 3.09
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31106>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Hendrik Tews announced:
I would like to announce the
The Enhanced Ocaml Documentation
Version 3.09
available via <http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~tews/htmlman-3.09>
The enhanced documentation contains the original html version of
the ocaml reference manual with the following changes:
- Changes (wrt version 3.08) are tagged with icons and color
- meta symbols of the grammar are "hot" and refer to their
definition.
- additional appendix containing just the grammar rules
========================================================================
7) Get a page from the Web
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31116>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Martin Chabr asked and Karl Zilles answered:
> I have been looking for ways to get a page in HTML
> from the Web, using an OCaml program, something like
> the following Python snippet:
>
> import urllib
> URL = "<http://www.ibm.com>"
> url = urllib.urlopen(URL)
> html = url.read()
>
> You supply the URL and receive the page in HTML. Is
> there anything simple like that in OCaml?
I use the Ocaml binding to the curl library. It has worked well for me
and it can handle high level details like maintaining cookies across
calls (for session continuity and logins):
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocurl/>
** Florian Weimer suggested:
You could use the Netclient library:
let s = Http_client.Convenience.http_get "<http://www.ibm.com>" in
output_string stdout s
(Compile with: ocamlfind ocamlc -package netclient -linkpkg file.ml)
** Eric Cooper added:
Here are two other ways: the ocamlnet package has an HTTP client,
or you can use Unix.open_process_in with "curl" or "wget".
========================================================================
8) Sexplib - library for S-expression conversions
Archive: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31123>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Markus Mottl announced:
we'd like to announce the availability of "Sexplib", which is a
library for handling S-expressions. It features a syntax extension
for OCaml using the Camlp4-preprocessor, which generates efficient
code derived from type definitions to convert OCaml-values to
S-expressions and vice versa. Errors during conversions are reported
fairly exactly and readably.
This syntax extension supports all extensional type constructions
(tuples/products, sum types, record types, variant types) together
with polymorphism. Other datatypes (objects; abstract ones) require
user-defined converters, which can be added very easily.
The parsing and pretty-printing functions for S-expressions together
with the automatically generated converters make this library very
useful for a variety of purposes, e.g. for representing datastructures
in human-readable form, for debugging, etc. We are using it for
handling fairly large and complex software configurations, and have
found this representation and functionality extremely helpful in
practice.
The Sexplib-library itself was initially derived from Martin Sandin's
Tywith-library, and is available free of charge under the
LGPL-license. You can download it from the following site:
<http://www.janestcapital.com/ocaml>
We, the Quant-group at Jane St. Capital, are in the process of setting
up this site to publish free software developed at our company. We
hope you will find a lot more useful libraries there in the near
future.
========================================================================
Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a quick trick to help you read this CWN if you are viewing it
using
vim (version 6 or greater).
:set foldmethod=expr
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^=\\{78}$'?'<1':1
zM
If you know of a better way, please let me know.
========================================================================
Old cwn
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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========================================================================
Alan Schmitt, <http://sardes.inrialpes.fr/~aschmitt/>
--
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool
happen.
.O.
..O
OOO
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