2020-06-16

Work on liveness analysis.

Cosmin says that we don't need liveness analysis. His point is that liveness analysis, and the algorithm I was implementing for it, is a technique for data flow analysis that mostly works on the simple imperative programming language defined in torbens book. It doesn't correctly handle kill and gen for arrays. I actually think my implementation of the algorithm works for the simple array examples I've tried, but it probably doesn't scale very well. Also, he's right that we can probably just rely on much simpler structural analysis of the program.

Either way, his point is that we can use two passes: first-use and last-use to get the same information through structural analysis. The last-use analysis is a backwards pass, but is basically the same as the first-use. It's probably also much simpler than the liveness analysis that I was doing before.

Correction: first-use is implied? I don't actually know why, but I guess it doesn't matter right now. Let's forget about the liveness analysis, and instead try to do a simpler last-use analysis.

Actually, before I start on the last-use analysis, I really should get started on the artifact review. Let's print the paper and read it, such that we know what to look for in the artifact.

It seems like there's bug in the window manager I use, sway, which causes it to close all open windows and programs when docking into my dock at DIKU. According to emersion on #sway it's

12:16:33 emersion | fixed in sway master
12:17:15 emersion | this is a common dock issue caused by a rapid hotplug and unplug

So, using NixOS, I thought it'd be an easy fix: Just override the version used in the derivation of sway to the newest master. After a lot of fiddling around and help on #nixos (thank you, clever) I came up with the following addition to my configuration.nix:

...

nixpkgs.overlays = [ (self: super: { sway = super.sway.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: rec {
  version = "master";
  src = super.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "swaywm";
    repo = "sway";
    rev = "45859be03f14fa0506ab8518feaec5ddb157e318";
    sha256 = "1nnkdw4djl0c0njgizz15x6flz7i9fbh71hk2hhhdazdyf0r9l3l";
  };
}); }) ];

...

Alas, that didn't fix my issue. I suspected that the new version wasn't being picked up from Github, so I even tried to override with a forked version of sway, in which I'd amended the output of --version, and it seemed like I was correct. Indeed, clever suspects that the following override lines from the sway module derivation are the culprit:

swayPackage = pkgs.sway.override {
  extraSessionCommands = cfg.extraSessionCommands;
  extraOptions = cfg.extraOptions;
  withBaseWrapper = cfg.wrapperFeatures.base;
  withGtkWrapper = cfg.wrapperFeatures.gtk;
};

I'll leave it for now. The dock that I have doesn't even work to charge my laptop, so it's not ideal anyway.

Because I always forget, and even though the link can be found on ucph.dk, I'll still write this down once again.

To print at DIKU, use webprint.science.ku.dk. Upload the file you want to print, and choose the printer named HCO-01-0-S11.

Read the paper, make some notes, review the artifact.