Cryptographic Primitives

[bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk]

barger writes:
 > Excuse my inconvenience Bryce, but will be Exupery somedays able to compile
 > whole VM ? 

It would be possible. But then you'd end up with a system like CMU
Common Lisp. I'm not sure that would be more portable than our current
system with Slang compiling to C.

 > I see that this is not the main direction of it now, but in near future it
 > can be huge help at least for SQUEAK NOS and also for Squeak 64 bit VM.
 > Maybe can be your work reused someway for slang ST to direct machine code
 > compilation...

I think we've got a 64 bit VM now thank's to Ian and Dan's work. I
haven't yet tried compiling it myself but mean to in the next few
weeks.

 > What do you think about this idea ?

It's interesting, it really depends on your goals. There's nothing
that would stop you doing it.

I'd probably try to write the interpreter in Smalltalk then statically
compile it using Exupery into assembly then run the assembler through
gas. The only reason to use gas is to avoid dealing with linker
formats. For SqueakNOS compiling to machine code should be possible.
But you'd have to rewrite all the C in the interpreter you need into
Slang or preferably Smalltalk.

So, you'd end up with the object memory written in Slang then as much
of the interpreter as possible running as regularly compiled
Smalltalk. There is a bit to think about to lift the interpreter up
to "statically" compiled Smalltalk. But once it's done you should be
able to recompile bits of it live to evolve it without needing to
restart the image.

I'd suggest waiting a bit more before starting to use Exupery for
such a project. If enough people are interested in doing it it could
be done.

Bryce