On 2-Nov-08, at 6:50 PM, Jörg F. Wittenberger wrote:


Yes, that seems to be the best course of action, unless Marc consents
to re-release his code under a BSD license for inclusion in Chicken.

If we ask nicely, he might very well do!

I hope so!  Marc, would you please do!

In "exchange" I shall take my spare time to finish the llrbtree (I admit
I'm afraid I've got hooked to do so anyway) and release it under a
license (set) compatible with gambit and chicken (and rscheme ;-).  In
the hope that this might improve gabmit-c too.

So please remove those legal road blocks.

Let me clarify the situation. My implementation of red-black trees (rbtree.scm) was inspired by the MIT-Scheme file of the same name. The MIT-Scheme file is licensed under the MIT license. The LGPL license I put on the Snow rbtree.scm was for consistency with the other Snow files. I am willing to change my rbtree.scm to an MIT license. Would that suit your purposes? In any case, the copyright information must be maintained, simply to indicate who has intellectual property of the code (i.e. an acknowledgement of who designed and wrote the code).

Concerning the alternative priority queue implementations (wttree.scm, llrbtree.scm and skip lists), you have to be careful because those implementations allocate memory (in the case of llrbtree.scm it is stack space for non-tail recursive calls). What this means is that the garbage collector might be called during a priority queue operation, possibly inside the thread scheduler. This is not a good thing because it precludes the implementation of object finalization by the garbage collector (i.e. the garbage collector cannot call object finalizers, such as will executors, at the end of the GC because a finalizer might request an operation on the priority queue which is currently in an inconsistent state). To put it another way, it is hard to make the priority queue operations appear atomic if they allocate memory. My red-black tree implementation allocates no memory and requires a shallow call stack.

Marc



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