Fw: Re: Re: Re: [MLton] self-compiling failed

[Baojian Hua]

> -----Original E-mail-----
> From: "Matthew Fluet" <matthew.fluet at gmail.com>
> Sent Time: 2010-5-19 21:51:36
> To: "Baojian Hua" <huabj at mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> Cc: mlton <mlton at mlton.org>
> Subject: Re: Re: [MLton] self-compiling failed
> 
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Baojian Hua <huabj at mail.ustc.edu.cn> wrote:
> > And the document at
> > http://mlton.org/SelfCompiling
> > seems a little out-of-date and not very informative for this.
> 
> Yes, I glanced at that when you mentioned your difficulties, and agree
> that it should be updated.
> 
> > Btw: I'm trying to self-compile MLton for that I'm trying to implement
> > some new optimizations on SSA IL. In this, I've found that the MLton's
> > expert option "-trace" won't work as I expected (it produce nothing).
> > A close look at the code reveals that the Assert.debug is set to false, so
> > it seems that I should set it and then build a "tracable" version. Is this
> > the perfect way to do this? Or else is there another option to control this?
> 
> There are two ways to enable the "-trace" option.
> 
> It is enabled under a SML/NJ build of MLton.  From the root of the
> mlton source tree, a "make smlnj-mlton" will build a SML/NJ heap image
> and copy it to build/lib.  The build/bin/mlton script will prefer a
> MLton build of MLton over a SML/NJ build of MLton, so be sure to
> remove build/lib/mlton-compile.  Because SML/NJ's cutoff recompilation
> is faster than MLton's whole program compilation, this is generally
> the way I work when debugging something like an SSA IL optimization
> pass.
Thanks. But in building with smlnj, the source "ssa/poly-hash.fun" won't
compile. A close look at the code reveals that changing the line 305 to

fun fini (hexp: Dexp.t): Dexp.t = hexp

can shut up the compiler. 

Does this mean a bug in smlnj?

> 
> It is also enabled under a MLton build of MLton that uses "-const
> 'MLton.debug true'".  From the root of the mlton source tree, a "make
> traced" will build such a compiler.  (This target to the root Makefile
> doesn't build everything, so you should only use it after having first
> done a "make".)  Then the build/bin/mlton.trace script will invoke the
> mlton-compile.trace executable that has the "-trace" option enabled.
> This build also enables exception histories, which is often useful for
> debugging.