Three wins in one commit.
1) heap-snapshot / heap-restore (asm arena primitive)
asm has no GC. Long-running servers leaked ~64 MB per heap growth.
Two new builtins let a programmer capture r15 and later rewind to
it, recycling intermediate allocations in O(1) memory.
Python + C get no-op versions so portable .lsp code can call them
unconditionally.
examples/http-server.lsp now takes a snapshot at top level and
rewinds after every request. Measured asm RSS: 88 KB initial,
100 KB after 100 requests, 100 KB after 1100 requests — flat.
Prior behavior was +64 MB per few thousand requests.
2) examples/http-client-bench.lsp — native HTTP load generator
Uses only the six tcp-* primitives + current-time-ms. Runs
identically in all three impls. Eliminates curl's ~2 ms/req
fork+exec overhead, so real server throughput shows up:
Python server ← Python client 2403 rps
C server ← C client 2439 rps
asm server ← asm client 2994 rps
asm server ← C client 2500 rps
The earlier curl-based bench was clamped near 400 rps by the
client; the actual servers handle 6–7× that.
3) MOAD-0001 cleanup
- c/builtins.c bi_string_replace: strncmp-at-every-position
(hand-rolled, sedimentary) → strstr (libc-tuned, typically
Boyer-Moore-Horspool). O(N*k) → O(N + matches*k).
- uncommonlisp.py _tokenize_lines: per-token src.count('\n', 0, pos)
→ precompute line_starts once, bisect_right per token.
O(N*M) → O(M + N log M).
Also adds current-time-ms to all three impls so benchmarks can
time themselves without relying on the Python/C float `current-time`
(asm has no floats). Seconds-since-epoch tagged as a 61-bit int.
Test counts unchanged: 571 py + 132 asm + 189 shared + 83 c = 975.
All green via make test-all.
Added tcp-listen/accept/connect/recv/send/close to Python, C, and asm.
One examples/http-server.lsp runs identically in all three impls and
serves HTTP/1.0 with routing, content-type, and content-length headers.
asm additions:
- SYS_SOCKET/BIND/LISTEN/ACCEPT/CONNECT/SETSOCKOPT syscalls
- 6 tcp-* builtins using the existing port encoding (SPECIAL ≥ 1000)
- bi_tcp_connect: dotted-quad IPv4 parser, no DNS dependency
Defects fixed along the way (surfaced by the HTTP server):
- string-append: was 2-arg only; now variadic (walks arg list twice)
- number->string: was stubbed to VAL_VOID; now correctly writes digits
into a heap-allocated string (incl. negative handling)
- String-literal reader: \r and \0 escape sequences now handled (was
silently dropping backslash, treating them as literal 'r' / '0')
- tcp_accept: sockaddr buffer was 8 bytes, now 16 (was corrupting
caller's stack when accept wrote full struct sockaddr_in)
Pinocchio benchmark (tests/web-benchmark.sh):
At concurrency=20, 1000 requests, serving a 1KB body:
uncommonlisp Python 373 req/s
uncommonlisp C 370 req/s
uncommonlisp asm 370 req/s
python3 http.server 381 req/s (stdlib reference)
busybox httpd 382 req/s (production reference)
All five converge within 3% — the client (curl fork/exec) is the
bottleneck, not the server. Our single-threaded blocking servers
are indistinguishable from battle-tested ones at this load.
Binary sizes:
uncommonlisp asm 45 KB (HTTP + everything else)
busybox httpd 2.1 MB (multi-call binary)
python3 8 MB (interpreter)
The asm HTTP server is 46× smaller than busybox and 176× smaller
than Python, serves from 7 Linux syscalls, and the entire protocol
handler is 70 lines of portable Scheme.
Test counts: 132 asm (up 1), rest unchanged. All green.
Benchmark exercises full save×load matrix across Python/C/asm plus the
mismatch cases (wrong format, truncated input, missing file, corrupt
header). Cases that used to segfault or report wrong paths now degrade
cleanly.
asm (uncommonlisp.s):
- (define var) with no value now binds to VOID instead of segfault
- portal-resume checks sys_read returned full 48-byte header; sanity-
checks heap_size and heap_base before committing r14/r15 restore.
Corrupt/truncated portals now return #f cleanly.
py (uncommonlisp.py):
- file-not-found error inside a nested (load) now reports the actual
missing path (via FileNotFoundError.filename) rather than the outer
script path.
- _load wraps UnicodeDecodeError (binary file loaded as text) into a
LispErr with the path; no more raw Python traceback.
tests/portal-benchmark.sh: 50-iter benchmark, 4 parts
(save / load / cross-process / mismatch-classification).
Representative numbers (this laptop, 2026-04-16):
setup+save: Python 126ms, C 3ms, asm 0.9ms
cross-proc: Py→Py 260ms, C→C 6ms, asm→asm 1.5ms
All three test suites still pass: 571 py unit, 131 asm, 189 shared.
portal-save: writes 48-byte header (magic, heap_size, heap_base, r14,
r15) + raw heap bytes via sys_write. 9.8KB for a state with fib(20).
portal-resume: reads header, remaps heap at saved base address via
MAP_FIXED so all pointers remain valid, restores r14/r15.
Binary format — no JSON, no parsing. Just bytes in, bytes out.
Carry on USB to air-gapped machine, resume from exact state.
Known limitation: builtins need re-init after resume (symbol table
lives in BSS, not heap). User-defined data survives intact.
108 existing tests pass.
No C. No libc. Just Linux syscalls and machine instructions.
2592 lines of GNU assembler. 13KB stripped binary. 1.8MB resident.
Features: quote, if, define, set!, lambda, begin, let, named-let,
cond, and, or. 34 builtins. Tag-in-low-bits values. Bump allocator
on mmap'd pages. TCO via jmp. Symbol interning.
Runs: (fact 10)=3628800, (fib 35)=9227465, (ack 3 4)=125.
24 tests pass. Zero dependencies.
"If you vibe code in assembly, you don't even need a compiler."
