[Vm-dev] InterpreterSimulator

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Fri Mar 11 13:28:57 UTC 2016


On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 12:04:22AM -0800, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> 
> This is where it gets tricky.  The implementations of longAt:[put:] et al in the subclasses are only for simulation.  The real ones are in platforms/Cross/vm/sqMemoryAccess.h and depend on, or rather are chosen to deal with, the semantics of the actual underlying machine, what its word size, endianness and alignment restrictions are.  The check for alignment above therefore serves to enforce the constraints that the real versions obey on actual hardware.  Hence removing that alignment check would only be valid on 32-bit machines that allowed unaligned 64-but access, a shrinking set these days that doesn't even include x86 in its sse instructions. 
> 

You may want to look at package MemoryAccess in the VMMaker repository. I
have not integrated into the oscog branch, but that could probably be done
without too much work.

This is an implementation of the sqMemoryAccess.h macros written entirely
in slang. That means that there is no hidden CPP magic. It is written entirely
in Smalltalk, and the "simulated" macros are what actually gets translated
to C. With full inlining, performance is about the same as the CPP macros
(or at least it was the last time I checked it).

I wrote the package when was working out the 32/64 bit image and host
combinations for VMM trunk. I was finding the CPP macros rather confusing,
so it helped be able to work with them in Smalltalk rather than try to
guess what the macros were going to do.

Dave



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