Hacking on, and with, Racket

Things have been a bit quiet on the research front: I've been doing a a bit of hacking and a lot of yak shaving.

Today's accomplishment: I've added a new primitive to Racket for compare-and-set. In hindsight, this is a pretty simple patch, maybe a couple-dozen lines. But getting there required some quality time with the 14Kloc jit.c file.

The upshot is that, with this patch, Racket can be used for writing non-blocking algorithms, modulo ongoing work to increase concurrency in its runtime system. I'm planning to design and build a comprehensive library for parallelism, inspired by java.util.concurrent but with somewhat different goals. I hope to have more to say about this soon.