The MAL interpreter always works in the context of a single user session, which provides for storage access to global variables and modules.
The linkage between MAL interpreter and compiled C-routines is kept as simple as possible. Basically we distinguish four kinds of calling conventions: CMDcall, FCNcall, FACcall, and PATcall. The FCNcall indicates calling a MAL procedure, which leads to a recursive call to the interpreter.
CMDcall initiates calling a linked function, passing pointers to the parameters and result variable, i.e. f(ptr a0,..., ptr aN). The function returns a MAL-SUCCEED upon success and a pointer to an exception string upon failure. Failure leads to raise-ing an exception in the interpreter loop, by either looking up the relevant exception message in the module administration or construction of a standard string.
The PATcall initiates a call which contains the MAL context, i.e. f(MalBlkPtr mb, MalStkPtr stk, InstrPtr pci). The mb provides access to the code definitions. It is primarily used by routines intended to manipulate the code base itself, such as the optimizers. The Mal stack frame pointer provides access to the values maintained. The arguments passed are offsets into the stack frame rather than pointers to the actual value.
The runtime context of a MAL procedure is allocated on the runtime stack of the corresponding interpreter thread. Access to the elements in the stack are through index offsets, determined during MAL procedure parsing. Runtime storage for variables are allocated on the stack of the interpreter thread. The physical stack is often limited in size, which calls for safeguarding their value and garbage collection before returning. A malicious procedure or implementation will lead to memory leakage.
A system command (linked C-routine) may be interested in extending the stack. This is precluded, because it could interfere with the recursive calling sequence of MAL procedures. To accommodate the (rare) case, the routine should issue an exception to be handled by the interpreter before retrying. All other errors are turned into an exception, followed by continuing at the exception handling block of the MAL procedure.
Calling a built-in or user-defined routine may lead to an error or a cached status message to be dealt with in MAL. To improve error handling in MAL, an exception handling scheme based on catch-exit blocks. The catch statement identifies a (string-valued) variable, which carries the exception message from the originally failed routine or raise exception assignment. During normal processing catch-exit blocks are simply skipped. Upon receiving an exception status from a function call, we set the exception variable and skip to the first associated catch-exit block. MAL interpretation then continues until it reaches the end of the block. If no exception variable was defined, we should abandon the function alltogether searching for a catch block at a higher layer.
Exceptions raised within a linked-in function requires some care. First, the called procedure does not know anything about the MAL interpreter context. Thus, we need to return all relevant information upon leaving the routine.
Second, exceptional cases can be handled deeply in a recursion, where they may also be handled, i.e. by issueing an GDKerror message. The upper layers merely receive a negative integer value to indicate occurrence of an error somewhere in the calling sequence. We then have to also look into GDKerrbuf to see if there was an error raised deeply inside the system.
The policy is to require all C-functions to return a string-pointer. Upon a successfull call, it is a NULL string. Otherwise it contains an encoding of the exceptional state encountered. This message starts with the exception identifer, followed by contextual details.
Garbage collection is relatively straightforward, because most values are retained on the stackframe of an interpreter call. However, two storage types and possibly user-defined type garbage collector definitions require attention: BATs and strings. They should be garbage collected before returnin to the enclosing calll.
A key issue is to deal with temporary BATs in an efficient way. References to bats in the buffer pool may cause dangling references at the language level. This appears as soon as your share a reference and delete the BAT from one angle. If not careful, the dangling pointer may subsequently be associated with another BAT.
All string values are private to the VALrecord, which means they have to be freed explicitly before a MAL function returns. The first step is to always safe the destination variable before a function call is made.
All operations are responsible to properly set the reference count of the BATs being produced or destroyed. The libraries should not leave the physical reference count being set. This is only allowed during the execution of a GDK operation. All references should be logical.
The execution engine comes in several flavors. The default is a simple, sequential MAL interpretation. For each MAL function call it creates a stack frame, which is initialized with all constants found in the function body. During interpretation the garbage collector ensures freeing of space consumptive tables (BATs) and strings. Furthermore, all temporary structures are garbage collected before the funtion returns the result.
During the boot phase, the global symbol table is initialized with MAL function and factory definitions, and loading the pre-compiled commands and patterns. Libraries are dynamically loaded by default. Expect tens of modules and hundreds of operations to become readily available. Modules can not be dropped without restarting the server. The rational behind this design decision is that a dynamic load/drop feature is often hardly used and severely complicates the code base. In particular, upon each access to the global symbol table we have to be prepared that concurrent threads may be actively changing its structure. Especially, dropping modules may cause severe problems by not being able to detect all references kept around. This danger required all accesses to global information to be packaged in a critical section, which is known to be a severe performance hindrance.