sandra@utah-cs.UUCP (Sandra J Loosemore) (07/30/87)
I have been seeing some very strange behavior from the Lisp system I've been hacking on: it runs fine (initializes itself, loads and executes a compiled file) the first time, but if I run it a second time without rebooting it dies during initialization with 4 bombs. I notice that it is allocating the heap at a base address about 20K lower the second time around -- I'm using "Malloc" to allocate it as a single big (~300K) chunk, and being careful to "Mfree" it before exiting. Could the bugs with Malloc that I've heard vague rumours about be causing the bombs? I'm also being careful to restore the initial values of registers before exiting, BTW. Is there anything else I should be doing in the way of cleanup? Incidentally, my Lisp compiler is working quite well now. It will compile the TAK benchmark to run in exactly the same time (1.83 seconds) as Alcyon C, so it's definitely going to make Lisp a reasonable language on the ST if I ever get the time to finish the runtime system! (This is an entirely new Lisp implementation and has nothing to do with Portable Standard Lisp.) -Sandra Loosemore (sandra@cs.utah.edu, sandra@utah-cs.uucp)