May 31, 2021

now about contact

May 31, 2021

Managing side-effects on the Mu computer

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-2021-05-31 (video; 2 minutes)

Screenshot of the Mu prototyping environment running in a Qemu window. There's a code editor on the left and a REPL on the right. The REPL can show prints to a picture-in-picture fake screen. It also permits drilling down into the execution of a run to understand or debug what the computer did.

The Mu computer's prototyping environment uses traces to explain and debug programs. But traces are expensive to compute and made the environment slow and laggy.

I fixed things by collecting only a shallow trace at first, and iteratively deepening on demand by rerunning programs. This only works because it's safe to rerun functions. There are no side-effects in Mu.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.