[Vm-dev] Squeak Port for Android: Update

[David T. Lewis]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 11:08:31PM +0200, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:
>  
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 8:16 AM, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> >
> > On 4/20/2011 0:37, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:
> >
> >> Since I haven't seen the Slang sources (I have no idea where they are)
> >> of the Event VM, I cannot tell much.
> >>
> >
> > They are right here:
> >
> > http://squeakvm.org/win32/experimental/androidvm.zip
> >
> >
> But where is VMMaker? I mean...the mcz or something from VMMaker so that you
> can recreate the C sources ?

I am not an Android developer, but I think I can point you to the
answer.

Andreas gives an overview of the the VM works on the Google
source project <http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/>.

If you unpack the sources (androidvm.zip) you will find an Eclipse
project with some Java glue code for integrating the VM into the
Android environment, and bunch of C code in the project/jni folder.
This includes the interp.c file generated from VMMaker, which has
this identification at the top of the file:

/* Automatically generated from Squeak on 17 January 2010 5:57:19 pm 
   by VMMaker 3.11.8
 */

The "VMMaker 3.11.8" tag gives an approximate idea of the VMMaker
version, and if you look through the VMMaker archives on SqueakSource,
you can see that this would have come from a VMMaker based on this
version:

  Name: VMMaker-dtl.147
  Time: 1 November 2009, 10:41:36 pm
  Ancestors: VMMaker-dtl.146
  
  VMMaker 3.11.8
  Reference Mantis 7407: BitBlt. Incorrect alpha values for several rules.
  Add VMMaker-BitBlt-AlphaFixes-jmv-M7407.cs bitblt alpha fixes by Juan Vuletich

So you can reasonably conclude that Andreas was using a standard
VMMaker from this time period, possibly with some local changes
but basically a generic VMMaker.

As for the local changes, I would expect that they are the changes
that Andreas posted here:
  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2009-November/003437.html

So the fileout would be this attachment:
  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/attachments/20091113/970e2f4e/EventVM.1.bin

Andreas' posting here has the relevant links:
  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2011-April/007510.html

So in conclusion, the VMMaker for the Android VM is "hiding" right
where it has always been, in SqS/VMMaker :)

I cannot say for certain, but my expectation is that you could
use any version of VMMaker that you want (including the oscog branch)
as long as you generate an interpreter with no Intel dependencies. So
if you wanted to apply the event VM changes to a StackInterpreter, I
can think of no reason that this would not work also.

HTH,
Dave