FFI problem: too many arguments

Marcus Denker denker at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Feb 16 13:51:38 UTC 2006


On 16.02.2006, at 15:22, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:

> Andreas Raabwrote on Wed, 15 Feb 2006 22:13:26 -0500:
>> There is no fix for this problem. In Squeak, the number of parameters
>> for a method invocation is limited to 15.
>
> Not quite true (in theory) - the VI4 version of Squeak could have  
> up to
> 256 parameters (if my quick impression of the code is correct).
>
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2119
>
> In practice Nicolas will almost certainly not want to go that route
> given that nobody else will, so the answer is that indeed there is no
> fix for this problem.

There are a lot of upper bounds in the squeak bytecode, e.g. jump
offset, number of temps (256), number of instVars, number of Literals...

That's quite bad as soon as you try anything with code generation that
has different properties than Smalltalk code. Or when you try to  
annotate
code (e.g., for tracing or debugging or meta programming).

I'd love to see a vm and bytecode design with all these artificial  
limitations fixed...
in SmalltalkX Claus extended the bytecode a long time ago to have no  
limits at all
(offsets can grow indefinitly).

      Marcus



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