On 26-Jul-08, at 12:27 AM, Ang Beepeng wrote:
I understand that it will definitely not be any easy on this. I have roughly one year to work on the project, and it will mainly on writing a plugin to implement a matrix solver primitive. This is roughly what I understand. It's very true that I have really little or no knowledge to start on this, but I am willing to spend time to learn on whatever relevant. --
You're in luck. I doubt that you will need to learn anything much about the VM to do this. What you *will* need is to learn a bit about building a vm plugin which is hugely less work. Your exciting part is going to be writing the primitive in Slang which although it is a simple pidgin-C gets a bit tedious for large chunks of code.
There are lots of example plugins in the VMMaker package. They range from the trivial (FileCopyPlugin, for example), through modest (SoundCodecPlugin, Matrix2x3Plugin) to the complicated (KlattSynthesizerPlugin, RePlugin). You can write all the code in Slang, or part in Slang and part in any callable language (make it a widely available one if you want the result to be useful to many people) or even all in C (given suitable amounts of strange substances).
If you already have a solution to the basic problem for solving matrices then making a plugin out of it shouldn't be too hard. You really don't need to know how the vm works. What you *will* need to understand is how to write and implement good tests in order to decide if your plugin is doing exactly what you want. Make friends with SUnits (class TestCase and the TestRunner UI).
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: AG: Add Gibberish