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HyperQuark
Compile Scratch projects to WebAssembly to run them quite quickly. Hopefully.
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Timeline
It's been a while since my last devlog; I've been working on other projects. For hyperquark, I've been fixing more small and subtle bugs in the VTA (variable type analysis) system. These are really annoying to debug but my favourite one (i.e. the most frustrating) was where I was getting errors about the type stack being larger than the number of variables it was being assigned to. In the execution logs, it appeared that one step (a collection of operations) was being visited twice by the VTA module, but with a different set of opcodes. This was really very confusing, until I realised that steps can be accessed through more than one route - for instance through the different branches of an if/else block - and so visited more than one time. However, visiting a step can also modify that step (e.g. to write to outer-scoped variables), so on the second visit, any additional instructions were duplicated and so we ended up with a type stack double the size than was expected. It was a simple fix once I identified that, but it took a very long time to get there!
I don't really have any fun images of things working to give you, so have a pic of my latest error instead.
Today I fixed a bunch of little bugs around all sorts of things... so many I can't even remember what I've done. I think there are still some instances of variable graph node entries being in the wrong order (fun to debug 🙄) but hopefully those won't be too bad to fix - and once those are done I can move on to some slightly more interesting items on my todo list; then I can push the last few weeks of changes to the main branch and release v0.0.5. The image is a funky iterator adapter that I wrote today which I quite like. Apparently I've spent 2h26m since my last devlog, so this time must include some other time from the last few days that I haven't devlogged for - no idea what I was doing in that time tbh but was probably just more nitty gritty bug hunting.
Have a great Thursday :D
Just devlogging so I don't lose a little bit of time from yesterday - started refactoring how I handle string constants, using the js string imports extension rather than manually inserting them into a table. To do this I'm needing to add an additional lazy instruction for global indices, because we can't know what index a global will have until we've inserted all the necessary global imports, which can't happen until all steps are compiled.
Finally managed to iron out all the various bugs surrounding procedures in VTA. Turns out procedures need a lot of special casing because not only can they return multiple values, they also need any boxed inputs to remain unboxed - usually, boxed inputs are unboxed and passed into monomorphised blocks, which currently doesn't work with procedures - I would like to do procedure monomorphisation at some point but I need to figure out if it will be worth the trade off for code size. Not many lines changed for a long period of time but a lot of that was spent trying things out and then deleting them again.
Just adding a devlog so I don't lose my very important 8 minutes and 56 seconds of working today... I spent that time trying to debug an interesting issue in the VTA where a node is emitted which has more variable writes than there are elements on the stack. I know this must occur somewhere around the entry/exit to procedures, but I'm not sure where yet. Although I haven't yet fixed that bug, I did manage (i think) to preemptively fix another big which will occur on the exit to procedures. Maybe.
VTA (variable type analysis) now considers the flow of variables in and out of procedures; or rather, it will do once I've ironed out the bits that don't work. This required changing procedures to have return values (not yet implemented in WASM gen), along with considering procedures in the VTA graph generation - this included changing first-time global variable reads in procedures to argument access. Hopefully this'll allow for some nice optimisations once it's working. The commit is quite large but this includes changes before I started recording time for this hackclub event!
