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The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

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Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#51

Post by ice799 »

fhars wrote: post #31
wonnage wrote: post #22

Can someone dissect this a little more? My understanding is the pointer to str never gets written to the stack, and so str on the heap might get freed before zstream_append_input makes use of it. But how could the GC see this/what is the faulty assumption?

The point is that the GC cannot see that and so assumes that the object is no longer referenced and can be freed. A conservative collector works by scanning the live memory of the process for things that look like pointers into the same live memory and then assumes that all objects that are not the target of any of these pointers are garbage. Tough luck if the only reference to a live object lives in a register.

registers are scanned, too. the bug is not that the ref is in a register. the bug is that there are no refs anywhere. not on the stack and not in any register.

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#52

Post by codahale »

msbarnett wrote: post #50
strmpnk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should see Joe's rants on Erlang too. Not as bad as MRI but there are plenty of things to gripe about in beam.

I'd rather see a technical analysis of Erlang that didn't read like it was written by Kanye West and sponsored by Axe Body Spray.

Perhaps you should write that, then.

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#53

Post by jamesgolick »

msbarnett wrote: post #50
strmpnk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should see Joe's rants on Erlang too. Not as bad as MRI but there are plenty of things to gripe about in beam.

I'd rather see a technical analysis of Erlang that didn't read like it was written by Kanye West and sponsored by Axe Body Spray.

This would be funny if it made any sense and if it wasn't a ripoff of an old Merlin Mann tweet about DHH.

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#54

Post by jcapote »

msbarnett wrote: post #50
strmpnk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should see Joe's rants on Erlang too. Not as bad as MRI but there are plenty of things to gripe about in beam.

I'd rather see a technical analysis of Erlang that didn't read like it was written by Kanye West and sponsored by Axe Body Spray.

That's a pretty cool story you got there.

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#55

Post by Nelson69 »

davesims wrote: post #19

This post is a weird mix of careful technical analysis and douchey, Zed Shaw-style hysterical overstatement. However, I would like to see Matz' response to the recommended steps for a fix at the end. Sounds like a reasonable goal to add for Ruby 2.0. Note to self: Listening to Papoose while writing a technical blog post turns your otherwise important observations into a Chicken Littleish, end-of-the world rant.

I kind of branded it a bit "douchey" at first too but then as I thought about it, it seemed remarkably restrained considering he debugged this issue. It's not like this happened all the time, had to get kind of lucky and build and calibrate a system just right to capture it.

I don't intend this to be an inflammatory question, I'm sort of a perpetual ruby novice, it's never been my day job and I've never managed to sort of catch up with the community, as soon as I feel pretty good with something I find it's been obsoleted a couple times. I like it but how does the community at large deal with stuff like this? This guy found a real bug and invested some time in it, do other rubyists just deal with crashes and restart their stuff? Do they just consider it part of "being on the cutting edge?" Or do they not even notice?

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#56

Post by msbarnett »

Nelson69 wrote: post #55
davesims wrote: post #19

This post is a weird mix of careful technical analysis and douchey, Zed Shaw-style hysterical overstatement. However, I would like to see Matz' response to the recommended steps for a fix at the end. Sounds like a reasonable goal to add for Ruby 2.0. Note to self: Listening to Papoose while writing a technical blog post turns your otherwise important observations into a Chicken Littleish, end-of-the world rant.

I kind of branded it a bit "douchey" at first too but then as I thought about it, it seemed remarkably restrained considering he debugged this issue. It's not like this happened all the time, had to get kind of lucky and build and calibrate a system just right to capture it. I don't intend this to be an inflammatory question, I'm sort of a perpetual ruby novice, it's never been my day job and I've never managed to so…

In practice crashes due to this issue simply do not occur very often. I think I've had the VM segfault twice in the last two or three years.

That's what makes the hyperbolic tone of this article so douchey; he wrote up an interesting dissection of an edge case issue as though it were an ongoing catastrophe, mostly just to inject a bunch of chest-thumping rock-star bravado that added nothing of value to the discussion.

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#57

Post by rbranson »

codahale wrote: post #52
msbarnett wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather see a technical analysis of Erlang that didn't read like it was written by Kanye West and sponsored by Axe Body Spray.

Perhaps you should write that, then.

"Yo Ruby, I'm really happy for you, but Erlang has one of the best VMs of all time."

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#58

Post by Nelson69 »

msbarnett wrote: post #56
Nelson69 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of branded it a bit "douchey" at first too but then as I thought about it, it seemed remarkably restrained considering he debugged this issue. It's not like this happened all the time, had to get kind of lucky and build and calibrate a system just right to capture it. I don't intend this to be an inflammatory question, I'm sort of a perpetual ruby novice, it's never been my day job and I've never managed to so…

In practice crashes due to this issue simply do not occur very often. I think I've had the VM segfault twice in the last two or three years. That's what makes the hyperbolic tone of this article so douchey; he wrote up an interesting dissection of an edge case issue as though it were an ongoing catastrophe, mostly just to inject a bunch of chest-thumping rock-star bravado that added nothing of value to the discussion…

I get that. It's probably related to how many libraries you use and a lot of other things? There might be pathological ways to make it happen more frequently. It all depends on how and when it happens though.

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#59

Post by davesims »

msbarnett wrote: post #56
Nelson69 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of branded it a bit "douchey" at first too but then as I thought about it, it seemed remarkably restrained considering he debugged this issue. It's not like this happened all the time, had to get kind of lucky and build and calibrate a system just right to capture it. I don't intend this to be an inflammatory question, I'm sort of a perpetual ruby novice, it's never been my day job and I've never managed to so…

In practice crashes due to this issue simply do not occur very often. I think I've had the VM segfault twice in the last two or three years. That's what makes the hyperbolic tone of this article so douchey; he wrote up an interesting dissection of an edge case issue as though it were an ongoing catastrophe, mostly just to inject a bunch of chest-thumping rock-star bravado that added nothing of value to the discussion…

Agreed. As pointed out by others, this is a perennial problem with GCs in general. Obviously it doesn't happen very often, otherwise the business risk would have forced Matz or the Ruby community to fix it, else no one would have ever deployed on Rails, because, you know, there's that Fatal Ruby VM Bug that crashes your applications constantly and costs people lots of time and money.

The analysis was good, but the tone was ludicrous. It sounds far too much like: "Hey! everyone in the world should abandon MRI because of a bug I found!! That's right, me!!"

Re: The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

#60

Post by msbarnett »

Nelson69 wrote: post #58
msbarnett wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice crashes due to this issue simply do not occur very often. I think I've had the VM segfault twice in the last two or three years. That's what makes the hyperbolic tone of this article so douchey; he wrote up an interesting dissection of an edge case issue as though it were an ongoing catastrophe, mostly just to inject a bunch of chest-thumping rock-star bravado that added nothing of value to the discussion…

I get that. It's probably related to how many libraries you use and a lot of other things? There might be pathological ways to make it happen more frequently. It all depends on how and when it happens though.

Well, we're using a large number of gems, a number of which rely on native code.

This issue is no doubt a pain in the ass for gem authors to debug, but it's definitely not something that library users are running into with any sort of frequency.

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