Formal Methods

Debounce and other callback combinators

Flapjax, JavaScript, Programming Languages2 Comments

It is serendipitous that I noticed a blog post about a callback combinator while adding a few drops to the Flapjax bucket.

Flapjax is nothing more than a coherent set of callback combinators. The key insight to this set of callback combinators is the “Event” abstraction — a Node in FJ’s implementation. Once callbacks are Nodes, you get two things:

  1. a handle that allows you to multiply operate on a single (time-varying) data source, and
  2. a whole host of useful abstractions for manipulating handles: mergeE, calmE, switchE, etc.

The last I saw the implementations of Resume and Continue, they were built using this idea. The more I think about it, the more the FJ-language seems like the wrong approach: the FJ-library is an awesome abstraction, in theory and practice.

Practical OCaml

Programming Languages, SoftwareLeave a comment

Suppose you were trying to run some experiments about L1 D-caches. (You may also suppose that this is a homework problem, but that’s life.) You’re given a trace of loads and stores at certain addresses. These addresses are 32-bits wide, and the trace is in a textual format:
1A2B3C4D L
DEADBEEF S
1B2B3C4D L
 represents a load to 0x1a2b3c4d, followed by a store to 0xdeadbeef, followed by a load to 0x1b2b3c4d. (You might notice the two loads may be in conflict, depending on the block and cache size and the degree associativity. In that case, you might be in my computer architecture class…)

This is problematic. Naturally, you’d like to process the trace in OCaml. But did I mention that the trace is rather large — some 600MB uncompressed? And that some of the addresses require all 32 bits? And some of the statistics you need to collect require 32 bits (or more)? OCaml could process the entire trace in under a minute, but the boxing and unboxing of int32s and int64s adds more than twenty minutes (even with -unsafe). I felt bad about this until a classmate using Haskell had a runtime of about two and a half hours. Yeesh. C can do this in a minute or less. And apparently the traces that real architecture researchers use are gigabytes in size. Writing the simulator in OCaml was a joy; testing and running it was not.

There were some optimizations I didn’t do. I was reading memop-by-memop rather than in blocks of memops. I ran all of my simulations in parallel: read in a memop, simulate the memop in each type of cache, repeat. I could have improved cache locality by reading in a block of memops and then simulating in sequence; I’m not sure how the compiler laid out my statistics structures. I could’ve also written the statistics functions in C on unboxed unsigned longs, but didn’t have the patience. I’d still have to pay for boxing and unboxing the C structure every time, though. Still: one lazy summer week, I may give the code generation for boxed integers a glance.

Writing in Computer Science

Formal Methods5 Comments

Frankly, how do you do it? In particular, how do you do it well? So much writing in CS is obscure and difficult, if not poorly edited, I’m not sure where to look.

What are some examples of good writing in computer science research? Functional pearls tend to be well written, but I’m more interested in research writing. I’m looking for papers that not only introduce a new idea, but do so clearly and effectively. Bonus points if it’s a good idea, but I’d just like to see something worth emulating.

Examples are clearly a starting point, but it seems to me that the only way to improve is practicing with aware, concerted effort.

C# GC Leaks

Flapjax, Programming Languages5 Comments

Reading this experience report from the DARPA challenge via Slashdot, I wondered: if event registration caused object retention, how can we deal with these memory issues in Flapjax?

Worrying about memory leaks in JavaScript is a losing battle — the browsers have different collectors. But given functional reactive programming in other settings (e.g., Java/C#), how can we solve this kind of problem? We looked at deletion briefly, but never had time to address the issue in detail. The complexity in our case is that the event registration encodes the entire application — how do you decide that a certain code path is dead? It may be helpful to view a functional-reactive program as a super-graph of data producing, splitting, merging, and consuming nodes; the application state is the subgraph induced by the active nodes reaching the consumers. Then there’s a certain static overhead for the program, plus the dynamic overhead of its active components.

Most of the Flapjax code I’ve written has been for the user interface, so binding and unbinding isn’t much of an issue: if the interface changes temporarily (e.g., tabs), the older behavior is usually recoverable and shouldn’t be collected. When working with more complex models with longer lived state, a deletion policy is more important. Shriram has been working on larger Flapjax applications with application logic as well as presentation — I wonder if he’s run into serious GC issues.

Lifting in Flapjax

Flapjax, JavaScript, Programming Languages6 Comments

In the Flapjax programming language, ‘lifting’ is the automatic conversion of operations on ordinary values into operations on time-varying values. Lifting gets its name from an explicit operation used with Flapjax-as-a-library; we use the transform method call or the lift_{b,e} functions. To better understand lifting, we’ll walk through a simple implementation of the Flapjax library.

I consider the (excellent) Flapjax tutorial prerequisite reading, so it will be hard to follow along if you’re not vaguely familiar with Flapjax.

The following code is all working JavaScript (in Firefox, at least), so feel free to follow along.

Continue reading

Another nasty bug — and an idea

Programming Languages, SoftwareLeave a comment

I spent about two hours tracking down a DOM node sharing bug — nodes were being put into a new structure outside of the document before the salient data had been read out. While there was no information in these nodes, the lens system insisted that they still be there. (More on that — eventually.)

After finally tracking it down and writing a version of cloneNode that also copies event handlers, everything worked. Between this and the last prototype aliasing bug I had, I got an idea. A programmer could keep a “bug journal”, a list of bugs found and described first by their behavior, then by their solution (and, if those two aren’t descriptive enough, the underlying problem should be described as well). For example, two days ago I ran into my first genuine typing bug in JavaScript — a type checker would have rejected my program, and from the errors generated it wasn’t obvious where the problem was.

This practice could be useful in a few ways. First, the process of writing down the description can help the programmer find the solution. Tedious, but perhaps worthwhile. Surely some bugs would end up being described post facto, since it’s not worth the time when the fix is fairly clear. Second, the solution may add to a ‘bag of tricks’ at the programmer’s/team’s disposal. Third, the bug and solution tease out invariants in the program, and so the bug journal could be gleaned for inter-module and system-level documentation.

Fourth, and dearest to my heart, I think it’s an interesting way to evaluate programming languages. The bug log of a programmer writing an e-mail interface in Java and that of one writing such an interface in JavaScript would provide for some interesting contrasts. To provide more than anecdotal evidence, you’d need to use a much larger sample size of programmers and kinds of programs being written.

I think the bug journal would differ profoundly from examination of bug tracking logs. Only the truly mysterious bugs and the large, architectural shortcomings make it into the tracker. On a daily basis, programmers struggle with making buggy code workable — before it ever hits version control. So bug tracking logs can highlight difficulties in design and with the team, but a bug journal shows exactly what a programmer has to deal with.

More on this

Programming Languages2 Comments

So I showed my confusing problem detailed in this last post to Dave Herman, who after an initial surprise, said that this was probably due to ES4 expansions method binding — that is, o.f sometimes closes over this, but sometimes not.

It doesn’t work in Opera or IE — they return false for both function calls — but it seems that if they implement ES4, the first call will eventually return true. That seems terrible to me — it was so surprising! It also makes it a little difficult to use JavaScript itself as a compiler representation, since you can’t use A-normal form if let-abstraction doesn’t work. Never mind that programmers (read: I) use let-abstraction to break up complicated expressions when debugging, and so this change in behavior will only confuse matters more.

Dave pointed out that in trade-offs between consistency and convenience, the latter sometimes wins, particularly when changes affect thousands and millions of people. But it’s not clear to me how convenient this is; it’s a tiny shortcut for those who know about it, but it’s very fragile. I’d liken it to operator precedences: in only a few cases do people take advantage of the ordering, so arithmetic expressions are generally just written out with parentheses for clarity.

Capture this!

Programming Languages9 Comments

JavaScript woes:

function C() {
    var _this = this;
    this.foo = function () { return _this === this; }; 
    this.bar = function () { return this.foo; };
    return this;
}
var c = new C();

What is the value of c.foo()? What is the value of c.bar()()? Both are true. But let:

var foo = c.bar()

What is the value of foo()?

If you thought it was true, you’re wrong. This doesn’t make much sense at all. Either this is captured by a dot, or it isn’t. Looking at the inner call to c.bar, it’s syntactically obvious that the call to bar has this = c. But why is that preserved when evaluating it within an outer expression, but not when we split the expression into two statements?

I’m sure this has been seen before, but I’ll probably show it to Dave Herman anyway. If I remember correctly, Python gets this right. Between this and a prototype aliasing bug I had yesterday, I’m irritated.

As an aside, I was speaking with Arjun Guha last night, and none of the conventional type theory would have helped me with these problems. In fact, I get almost no type errors in JavaScript — only grotesque object model problems.