Last night I had a really interesting idea about the VM...
For now, we have a special VM platform that is "squeakNOS". This is sometimes a problem, we need a custom makefile, the VM gets old and we are still working with the old interpreter because of this. Supporting the makefile is really boring.
What I'm thinking about, then? We have nativeboost to execute binary code, an assembler and even prototype of smalltalk to binary translator (waterfall), wouldn't it be possible to use all that to make the standard unix VM work with the sq/NOS image?
What work I think that would be required?
- Making the image partly POSIX compliant? This means it should be able to receive syscalls and respond to them, probably doing nothing in most cases.
- Re-coding the support code written in C. But doing it in smalltalk and nativizing it with waterfall or with asmjit. This code is really short, shouldn't be much work.
- Moving some fancy stuff from actual Makefile to Smalltalk. The actual Makefile has to do some special linking of binary code. For example, it takes some binary code from libc and puts it in the VM. We'll have to do this from the image.
What we gain? Important and cool stuff:
- We don't need a special vm any more. This removes a barrier to entering the project. - We get this support code written in smalltalk so we get closer to the idea of a full-smalltalk OS - We get POSIX compatibility, this means we might be able to/get closer to execute code compiled for unix. - We get POSIX documented in smalltalk code... I don't know if somebody is interested in this anyway
Cool, isn't it?
We should look for an M.Sc thesist ;P
Cheers, Javier.