Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Make CHICKEN build process deterministic

[Kooda]

On Mon, 06 Jun 2016 16:36:18 +0200,
address@hidden wrote:
> Ok, but integrating this into the core could be done in a simpler way,
> if I understand correctly, by simple changing the way symbol hashing
> operates?

That’s not the only problem here. Any call to (random) in the compiler
might cause non-determinism in the output, as well as calls to
(current-seconds) for example.

If the method used in this patch not suitable, I’ll happily do it some
other way.

My first approach was to remove calls to (random) and
(current-seconds) and use (gensym) or something similar instead,
depending on the case. But I thought that maybe these (random) calls
were there for a good reason so I didn’t want to change the behaviour
of the code too much.

I also tried changing how symbol hashing operates, as you suggest, but
I suppose the random seed of the hash table is there as a security
measure, we have to keep it, it’s just not that useful in the compiler
itself.