On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima
<yoshiki@vpri.org> wrote:
At Thu, 7 May 2009 09:04:54 -0700,
Eliot Miranda wrote:
>
> - remove stack access from the API, writing them as SmartSyntaxPlugins where arguments are passed in as parameters,
> returning the result on success and 0 (not SmallInteger 0) on
> failure
In these days, nobody would care much about it, but this would
make it harder to simulate a platform independent performance primitive in the image?
I don't think it makes any difference. In the simulator the VM could e.g. use perform:withArguments: to invoke the primitive. The real VM needs to do something similar and have glue to the platform's native calling convention, which can be as simple as a 32-element switch statement:
switch (numArgs) {
case 0: result = primitiveFunctionPointer(stackTop()); break;
case 1: result = primtiveFunctionPointer(stackValue(1),stackTop); break;
...
or as sophisticated as machine code generated on the fly.
> - provide isImmediateObject: and use it in place of isIntegerObject: when the objective is to select heap objects. Use
> isCharacterObject: when the objective is to select a character. I
> intend to add immediate characters within the next few months.
Are you going to use UTF-32 or UTF-16 for it?
Characters would be Unicode code points (WideString is UTF-32 right?). UTF-16 is a variable-length string encoding. Presumably there will be primitive converters to/from UTF-16 to WideString.
-- Yoshiki