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 at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: AG: Add Gibberish