Pachuco now has MIPS32 support, as anticipated in a previous post.

I had the MIPS32 support almost working early this year. But as I was doing some final testing, I noticed intermittent errors under some conditions: segfaults and other “shoudn't happen” errors. The pachuco bootstrapping process is intended to be deterministic: whether it completes without errors, and the resulting compiler binary if it does so, should only depend on the inputs to that process. But what are the inputs? The source files are the most obvious and significant part. But some other things can potentially have an impact. The HEAP_SIZE environment variable sets the size of the garbage-collected heap for the pachuco runtime. When things are working properly, this should not make a difference to program behaviour. But I found that for some values of HEAP_SIZE, the bootstrap would complete successfully, but other values would consistently result in crashes. As HEAP_SIZE affects at which points the GC runs, that suggests GC bugs.

The x86 and ARM targets didn't exhibit similar bugs, meaning that the problem was not in the GC itself, but rather in the generated MIPS32 code that calls into the GC. But after spending a while eyeballing the relevant code, I couldn't find it. Another approach to finding the cause would have been to debug a crash with gdb, but in the past I've found this approach to be a very slow process: problems in the GC can cause the program to go off the rails long after the GC was active.

So I decided to take a detour, and do some work to make it possible to track down GC issues more systematically. In the process of doing that, I found and fixed some latent bugs which affected the x86 and ARM, but those issues weren't responsible for the MIPS crashes. Once I had that working on the established platforms, I returned to the MIPS32 port, and spotted the bug almost immediately. It turned out to be one of those trivial but severe bugs that makes you wonder “how did this ever work?” — which is why it was easy to overlook.

So now pachuco has working MIPS32 support. I haven't yet updated the pachuco web site to talk about it though. That site hasn't received any attention in a long long time, so it needs a general overhaul.