Ares Weekly Meeting Notes

[jalehman]

~2024.5.29

Agenda

• Developer Alpha
  • [x] Release comms @jalehman
  • [x] Release notes @matthew-levan
    • [x] Reviewed by @joemfb
    • [x] Reviewed by @eamsden
  • Release this week? Yes or No
• Status of SKA @joemfb @eamsden
• Status of Vere Compatibility @matthew-levan
• Status of PMA memory corruption bug & fuzz testing @barter-simsum
• Status of PMA garbage collection @barter-simsum
• Status of interpreter optimizations @eamsden

Additional Notes

• Release
  • @eamsden to review release notes by EOD today
  • Only supported on Linux, sometimes(?) it works on MacOS — unsure whether it's M* only or supports older architectures: https://github.com/urbit/ares/issues/234
• Instructions for running Ares can be found in DEVELOPERS.md
  • @matthew-levan to add link to heading in README
• SKA
  • In context of memoization, we're emitting incorrect labels
  • 120 call sites with incorrect/missing labels in analysis of hoon.hoon out of ~20k total call sites
  • we have extensive debug information
  • appears we're matching properly, but not normalizing/propagating constraints properly
  • @joemfb has some questions for @eamsden that they need to run through together
    • @eamsden is mostly free on Friday
• Vere Compatibility
  • Making modifications to vere PR that allows replay in a subprocess. This will allow vere to call whichever serf is linked to perform replay.
  • Started on reading events, i.e. reading a vere pier from Ares. WIP
• PMA
  • Memory corruption bug is believed to be solved
  • Chaos monkey testing is being started soon
  • @barter-simsum is clearing out some smaller known PMA bugs
  • Discussion on garbage collection between @barter-simsum @eamsden @joemfb happening later today
  • Garbage collection & testing can run in parallel
• Interpreter optimizations
  • Blocked on completion of SKA
  • Possible to optimize the treewalking interpreter some, gains unclear w/ SKA
  • Initial line of work: modify linearizer so it emits noun code, output is contiguously numerically indexed so it can be efficiently referenced from arrays
    • Not blocked on SKA
• @matthew-levan has anyone spoken with @ashelkovnykov about picking up work on this again?
  • @belisarius222 talked to Alex this morning, currently has no availability to work on ares
  • He seems interested in doing some work on this again when he's back from Japan, earliest June 4th