3.7 moving to beta tomorrowish
Alan Grimes
alangrimes at starpower.net
Fri Mar 26 18:49:34 UTC 2004
Michael Rueger wrote:
> Doug Way wrote:
>
>> Or, we could use the occasion of having 4.0 be the next release to go
>> for whatever VM overhaul needs to be done (if any), and have the
>> image format change in this next release.
>
I've been looking at the VM for the last few days and I would definitely
like to see the following changes:
1. primitive "add" is coded very differently from "primitiveBitOr" and
friends...
Furthermore, it seems that the current coding of BitOr (and friends)
will cause it to fail unnecessairly on smallInts when the sign bit
happens to be set... My proposal is to do as I am trying to do right now
and make the coding of all functions as consistient as possible.
2. A major overhaul that seems to be in order is the separation of
interpreter from the ObjectMemory heirarchy. The motovation of this
major refactoring is to begin to lay the groundwork for a move towards
supporting SMP/hyperthreading. (yes I know this is one of my "special
interests" ;)
To prepare for this step, interpreter changes should focus on
simplifying the class variables and remove the ones that are, infact,
obsolete. (some will be reported to be obsolete by Browser but aren't
while others are only assigned a value somewhere that is never used
while others are constants which, perhaps, should be implemented as
class methods as is done with the components of the Sokoban package.
Since I am now finally competent enough to begin to address these I also
volunteer to do much of the grunt work. Compile jobs are very fast on my
SMP machine anyway. ;)
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