On 20 August 2012 00:53, Chris Cunnington <smalltalktelevision at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12-08-19 6:26 PM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>
>> On 17 August 2012 22:21, Yanni Chiu <yanni at rogers.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 17/08/12 2:46 PM, Lawson English wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Which is a huge downside to the current implementation of NativeBoost,
>>>> although, in theory, you could create a version that would compile to C
>>>> via slang rather than using Igor's x86 assembler syntax.
>>>
>>>
>>> But it's called *Native*Boost. Are you suggesting non-native boost?
>>> Wouldn't
>>> that be Cog/JIT?
>>>
>> Right. It is native. You can talk directly to metal. No layers on
>> top.. you are the in total control.
>> This is the main motivation behind a project.
>> You can build abstractions on top of it, of course. And of course you
>> can make it portable across
>> as many platforms as you need.. It may be hard but it is doable.
>> But conceptually one thing are not gonna change: you have direct
>> access to machine code,
>> which means no compiler standing in your way, which generating
>> suboptimal code :)
>> And for some cases it is simply impossible to implement things in C
>> without heavy sacrifices in speed..
>> consider arithmetic overflow - in CPU's you have a flag which indicates
>> that..
>> but in C there is no way how you can access it.. so you cannot just write:
>>
>> int a, b;
>> if ( (result = a +b) > maxInt )
>> {
>>   .. switch to big integer arithmetic ..
>> }
>>
>> and i guess you can find many other cases where direct machine code is
>> more preferable than produced by compiler(s).
>>
>>
> In the last few posts you just wrote as many words arguing for NativeBoost
> as David did explaining how to get started writing a plugin. Except when he
> was done a person could actually start to write a plugin. If you and Lawson
> spent as much time providing examples for NativeBoost as you do extolling
> its virtues, I could actually try it for myself.
>

Chris, its unfair. First, David only gave instructions how to set things up,
but not how to actually start writing a plugin.. if he would do that,
his post will be extended to dozens of pages :)

And second, if i remember, you were present at my presentation i
giving about NB,
so i really surprised to hear that from you.
But you right, i am not good at writing docs, because i am way too
lazy, and there's always more important things to do (well you know
;). But i am working on fixing that. :)

And for getting starting with NB you can just follow installation
instructions from here:
http://code.google.com/p/nativeboost/wiki/Installation

and if you need some examples of use, just recently i found this project:
http://www.squeaksource.com/ICU
which interesting in respect that it using two different FFI implementations,
so you can load both and browse code and compare the way how things done.
I am not sure in what state this project are, but since you don't need
to actually "run" things, you can just
browse the code to see how it done.

> Chris

-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.