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Scheme Programming Lessons from Tarot: 6 - efficient eval for macros

Eval

I never use eval in my scheme programming but it is a crucial part of implementing macros. We have already seen the macros that build up the tarot scheme language but this blog explains how macros (and eval) are implemented in tarot.

Now tarot implements scheme by compiling it to qcode. qcode runs on top of the qcode virtual machine. This allows us to implement eval in a trivial way, just compile the code and pass it off to the virtual machine to execute.

Here’s the snippet from compiler.scm :

( define ( eval exp ) ( let (( p ( vm:open ))) ( compile exp #f p ' ( halt ))) ( vm:finish p ))

In previous scheme implementations I didn’t have the luxury of a VM to pass code off to for efficient execution, so instead I implemented eval by using a metacircular interpreter that would recursively walk the abstract syntax tree - this is very very slow in comparison!

vm:open and vm:finish

These are functions that the virtual machine exposes to the underlying scheme. It does this by providing them as builtins. vm/builtins.c :

glo_define ( intern ( "vm:open" ), mk_numb ( 0 ), mk_bltn ( bltn_vm_open )); glo_define ( intern ( "vm:finish" ), mk_numb ( 1 ), mk_bltn ( bltn_vm_finish ));

The vm:open builtin creates a pipe, the compile command then compiles our code and writes the qcode into the pipe, finally vm:finish closes up the pipe and then loads and executes everything that was written into it:

// VM scm bltn_vm_open () { int fd [ 2 ]; // make a pipe info_assert ( ! pipe ( & fd [ 0 ])); // make a port out of it return mk_pipe ( fdopen ( fd [ 1 ], "w" ), fdopen ( fd [ 0 ], "r" )); } scm bltn_vm_finish () { scm p = STACK ( 0 ); info_assert ( scm_gettag ( p ) == ATOM_PRT ); FILE * f1 , * f2 ; scm * tmp = vm_code + vm_code_size ; f1 = port_get_file ( p ); f2 = port_get_pipe_end ( p ); fclose ( f1 ); load_code ( f2 ); fclose ( f2 ); // TODO remove it from the table // but dont re-close the fds vm_exec ( tmp ); return reg_acc ; }

and vm_exec is the main interpreter loop that we already saw inside interpreter.c.

Macros

That shows how the tarot compiler is able to implement an efficient eval . Now let’s look at how macros are implemented.

The compiler processes the input source code by first parsing it then desugaring it then performing more serious compiler passes to crunch the code down into qcode. It is in the desugar.scm pass that macros are implemented.

The main purpose of the desugar pass is to insert the implicit begin in lambda and generally just make the scheme code fit a more uniform style. As it does this it expands all uses of macros.

We have an assoc list (in a mutable box) called macro-definitions , for an entry in this assoc table the key is the macro name and the value is the evaluated function implementing the expander.

( define macro-definitions ( box ' ())) ( define ( load-macro mac ) ( if ( head? 'defmacro mac ' ()) ( push-box! macro-definitions ( cons ( cadr mac ) ( eval ( caddr mac )))) ( eval mac ))) ( define ( macro? exp ) ( and ( pair? exp ) ( cond (( assoc ( car exp ) ( unbox macro-definitions )) => cdr ) ( else #f ))))

Therefore to apply a macro when we see one, we simply call the expansion function and desugar the result:

( define ( desugar exp shadow ) ( cond ... (( macro? exp ) => ( lambda ( expander ) ( desugar ( expander exp ) shadow ))) ... ))

That’s all there is to it!