ares/docs/proposal/milestones.md
2022-05-09 17:43:26 -04:00

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# New Mars project milestones
The two major research (rather than implementation) goals of the New Mars project are:
1. The effectiveness of an on-stack bump allocator and delimited copying collector as a memory manager for Nock computational memory.
2. An effective linearization strategy for Nock code generation.
## Near Term: Memory management
The goal of this set of milestones is to validate the 2stackz memory model and its implementation
- run nock
* 2stackz allocator (implemented)
* tree-walking interpreter (in-progress)
+ unifying equality
+ tree edits
- run non-trivial amounts of nock
* cue
* load a small pill (probably of a custom core)
- run some compiled hoon
* mug caching
* noun hashtable
* jam
* jet dashboard
+ optimize for simplicity / speed of implementation
## Next: code generation
The goal of this stage is to generate highly-linearized IR from Nock
Note that a substantial part of this milestone is already accomplished, if unvalidated.
The New Mars project began with linearization of Nock across Nock 2 and Nock 9 being a problem without theoretical or design solution.
Subject-knowledge analysis (SKA) is the (currently theoretical) artifact which permits such linearization.
- Firm up reference Hoon implementation of SKA
- Use SKA to bytecode-compile Nock
- This validates SKA as a code-generation and jet-matching strategy for Nock without bogging down in the details of LLVM
- Switch out bytecode for LLVM IR
## Later: heaps and paging
The goal of this stage is to permit New Mars to function fully as a Mars, saving snapshots and event logs, and paging infrequently used and/or large data out to disk.
- Threshhold based eviction to a heap
- Heap collection strategies
- Demand paging of heap objects
- Event logging and snapshotting using demand-paged heap objects
- Tie disk reclamation to virtual memory reclamation
## Historical progress:
Project time to this point has been spent:
1. Implementing the memory management strategy
2. Attacking the code linearization problem for Nock in order to come up with a means of producing direct, monomorphized calls to generated code for procedures and to jets.
The memory management implementation is complete but untested. The implementation of the tree-walking interpreter will permit us to test and harden this implementation.
The subject knowledge analysis is a still theoretical result, but a result nonetheless, which convincingly and constructively establishes that linearization and monomorphization of Nock for code generation is possible in a reasonably efficient manner.