[Vm-dev] Reviving the Android VM

Michael Rueger lists at andience.co.nz
Wed Jun 21 03:22:33 UTC 2017


Hi Ryan,

> The Newspeak ARMv7 builds are configured for running on Linux (Debian armhf), not Android. Android would require 
> building with a different toolchain and using different settings for the floating point ABI (-mfloat-abi=softfp)(Eliot, 

thank you for the insight!
Yes, that is why I started to pull the build directly into AndroidStudio and building with the CMake toolchain. Google 
still supports the .mk based builds, but they are on their way out. Also the newer NDKs seem to work quite differently 
from older ones, so most of the builds I found based on old -sometimes really old- NKD versions just won't build anymore.

> this difference will affect the JIT if you pass any floats from generated code to runtime functions, perhaps the 
> primitive for sin calls directly to libm's sin?). That would still only produce a VM that isn't connected to the UI or 
> other Android APIs; I expect getting this hooked up properly is a far bigger task than getting a working JIT.

Yes, that is the tricky part. As I mentioned, I got the VM  basically working, but as it is crashing when running on a 
background thread I'm stuck. By working I mean it is running, even making display callbacks into Android. But as it is 
blocking the UI thread, it's not very useful...

>     I'm also pretty sure that this VM is missing the event-driven features of Andreas' VM and it would be great to have
>     that folded back in.

Dmitry's VM seems to be event-driven, still need to try to get that to build.

Cheers

Michael


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