Oops, apologies, this was intended to go to vm-dev. Please follow-up 
over there.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Igor Stasenko wrote:
> 2010/1/20 Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de>:
>> Folks -
>>
>> I think that one of the more clever hacks I did for the Android VM deserves
>> proper generalization in the Interpreter. Since on Android the image is part
>> of the (compressed) application package it's not easily possible to pass a
>> file handle into the VM and have the VM read the image as an external file.
>>
>> Instead, I'm preloading the image file into memory and then hacked an
>> implementation of the sqImageFile* and sqAlloc* functions that would
>> basically operate on the image in memory. I think we should formalize this
>> idea for two reasons:
>>
>> a) It allows preloading the image into memory on platforms where the image
>> may not be in an external file.
>>
>> b) It trivially allows mmap()ing the entire image into memory (I think John
>> does that on the iPhone).
>>
>> What I'm proposing is an additional VM entry point, called
>>
>>  Interpreter>>readImageFromHeap: heapStart size: heapSize
>>
>> which takes to arguments: The pointer to the beginning of the
>> (pre-allocated) memory portion where the image file has been loaded or
>> mapped and a size for the allocated memory portion. The VM then assumes that
>> beginning at heapStart there is an image provided that it needs to properly
>> prepare (i.e., perform byte-reversal, pointer adjustment etc).
>>
>> The VMs would generally use this along the lines of:
>>
>>  memStart = self malloc(heapSize);
>>  fread(imageFile, memStart, fsize(imageFile));
>>  readImageFromHeapSize(memStart, heapSize);
>>
>> and of course a backwards compatible version of
>> readImageFromFile:HeapSize:StartingAt: could do the same (although I'd
>> rather drop that function altogether since it removes the need for
>> supporting various sqImageFile* functions).
>>
>> I'd also say that the same pattern should be used for *writing* image files,
>> that is we assemble the entire image in memory then call
>> sqImageFileWrite(fileName, heapStart, heapSize) and sqImageFileWrite is
>> really just a combo of fopen(); fwrite(); fclose();
>>
>> I think this scheme is much nicer, less complicated and offers more options
>> for implementing image loading than what we currently have.
>>
>> Comments?
>>
> +100,
> it allows us to avoid dependency from file position in interp.c ,
> which we are talked about earlier,
> since VM don't needs to read anything from file(s) anymore.
> Really, let the platform code read an image into memory and tell VM
> where to grab it.
> 
> 
>> Cheers,
>>  - Andreas
>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
>