1 Accumulation of half-understood design decisions eventually
2 chokes a program as a water weed chokes a canal. By refactoring
3 you can ensure that your full understanding of how the program
4 should be designed is always reflected in the program. As a
5 water weed quickly spreads its tendrils, partially understood
6 design decisions quickly spread their effects throughout your
7 program. No one or two or even ten individual actions will be
8 enough to eradicate the problem.
9 -- Martin Fowler, _Refactoring: Improving the Design
10 of Existing Code_, p. 360
11 ===============================================================================
12 some things that I'd like to do in 0.6.x, in no particular order:
13 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 As long as I'm working on the batch-related command-line options,
16 it would be reasonable to add one more option to "do what I'd want",
17 testing standard input for non-TTY-ness and running in no-programmer
21 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
23 I used CMU CL for years, and dozens of times I cursed the
24 inadequate breakpoint-based TRACE facility which doesn't work on
25 some functions, and I never realized that there's a wrapper-based
26 facility too until I was wading through the source code for SBCL.
27 Yes, I know I should have RTFM, but there is a lot of M..
28 (By the way, it would also be nice to have tracing behave
29 better with generic functions. TRACEing a generic function probably
30 shouldn't prevent DEFMETHOD from being used to redefine its
31 methods, and should perhaps trace each of its methods as well
32 as the generic function itself.)
34 ?? possibility 1: Add error-handling code in ntrace.lisp to
35 catch failure to set breakpoints and retry using
36 wrapper-based tracing.
37 ?? possibility 2: Add error-handling code in ntrace.lisp to
38 catch failure to catch failure to set breakpoints and output
39 a message suggesting retrying with wrapper-based breakpoints
40 ?? possibility 3: Fix the breakpoint-based TRACE facility so that
42 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
44 My system of parallel build directories seems to add
45 complexity without adding value.
47 ?? Replace it with a system where fasl output files live in the
48 same directories as the sources and have names a la
49 "foo.fasl-from-host and "foo.fasl-from-xc".
50 ?? (Perhaps something else will be required in order to port
51 to Microsoft Windows, since its filesystem doesn't have
53 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
55 It might be good to use the syntax (DEBUGGER-SPECIAL *PRINT-LEVEL*)
56 etc. to control the in-the-debug-context special variables. Then we
57 wouldn't have to pick and choose which variables we shadow in the
59 The shadowing values could also be made persistent between
60 debugger invocations, so that entering the debugger, doing
61 (SETF *PRINT-LEVEL* 2), and exiting the debugger would leave
62 (DEBUGGER-SPECIAL *PRINT-LEVEL*) set to 2, and upon reentry to the
63 debugger, *PRINT-LEVEL* would be set back to 2.
66 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
68 I still haven't cleaned up the cut-and-paste programming in
69 * DEF-BOOLEAN-ATTRIBUTE, DELETEF-IN, and PUSH-IN
70 * SB!SYS:DEF!MACRO ASSEMBLE and SB!XC:DEFMACRO ASSEMBLE
73 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
75 We be able to get rid of the IR1 interpreter, which would
76 not only get rid of all the code in *eval*.lisp, but also allow us to
77 reduce the number of special cases elsewhere in the system. (Try
78 grepping for 'interpret' sometime.:-) Making this usable might
79 require cleaning up %DEFSTRUCT, %DEFUN, etc. to use EVAL-WHEN
80 instead of IR1 transform magic, which would be a good
81 thing in itself, but might be a fair amount of work.)
83 ?? Delete, delete, delete.
84 ===============================================================================
85 other known issues with no particular target date:
87 bugs listed on the man page
91 byte compilation of appropriate parts of the system, so that the
92 system core isn't so big
94 Search for unused external symbols (ones which are not bound, fbound,
95 types, or whatever, and also have no other uses as e.g. flags) and
96 delete them. This should make the system core a little smaller, but
97 is mostly useful just to make the source code smaller and simpler.
99 adding new FOPs to provide something like CMU CL's FOP-SYMBOL-SAVE and
100 FOP-SMALL-SYMBOL-SAVE functionality, so that fasl files will be more
101 compact. (FOP-SYMBOL-SAVE used *PACKAGE*, which was concise but allowed
102 obscure bugs. Something like FOP-LAST-PACKAGE-SYMBOL-SAVE could have
103 much of the same conciseness advantage without the bugs.)
105 hundreds of FIXME notes in the sources from WHN
107 various other unfinished business from CMU CL and before, marked with
108 "XX" or "XXX" or "###" or "***" or "???" or "pfw" or "@@@@" or "zzzzz"
109 or probably also other codes that I haven't noticed or have forgotten.
111 (Things marked as KLUDGE are in general things which are ugly or
112 confusing, but that, for whatever reason, may stay that way