[Vm-dev] Squeak VM port to Google Native Client

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Wed, 04 May 2011 09:47:48 +0200,
Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> Very interesting. Can you roughly say what needs to do to get the Squeak 
> VM into NaCL?

  - No stdio files.  I wrote small wrappers for fopen, ftell, fseek,
    fread, and etc. for memory buffer.

  - No dlsym, dlopen and etc.  The Unix VM depends on them so a little
    simplifications and hack to make a NaCl VM module visible to the
    main VM.  (Thus no external plugin either.)

  - Write schemes to get the image data from the net.  the JavaScript
    to NaCl module interface is very limited so you need to work
    around it.

  - Adapt to PPAPI that provides a way to get drawable pixel buffers
    and get events.

  - multi threading for separating the interpreter and browser/NaCl
    module interaction.

  - A lot of figuring out of which library functions actually exists,
    which of these work and what values to be expected from the
    browser.

  - ...

-- Yoshiki


> On 5/4/2011 8:18, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
> >
> >    Hello,
> >
> >    I'm playing with Google Native Client a bit and made a port of
> > Squeak VM to it.  It is far from complete (even the state where
> > backspace or Cmd-p etc. does not work, sound does not work, etc.), It
> > now reached to the state where I can say the basic part of it is
> > working.
> >
> >    The source code is available at:
> >
> >    http://github.com/yoshikiohshima/NaClSqueak
> >
> > .  Also, f you have Google Chrome 11 beta available, try to turn on
> > the Native Client on (by typing "about:flags" into the title bar) and
> > access:
> >
> >    http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/squeak/squeak.html
> >
> > (The first try may take some time.)
> >
> >    - It is gnuify-ed but we're still learning the JIT situation of
> >      NaCl.  So, it' need some work to port Cog.
> >
> >    - The image data is embedded as a C array in this executable.  You
> >      can remove EMBEDDED_IMAGE_FILE flag off, and comment/uncomment the
> >      corresponding part of squeak.html, it can load the image
> >      separately via XMLHttpRequest of the browser.
> >
> >    - There is some strange issue when you do fast drag the system
> >      window.
> >
> >    - As you can see, the source code is derived from the Unix VM.  It
> >      was hard for me to write some CMake stuff to set it up for the
> >      cross compilation.  A help to merge it back to the Unix code would
> >      be greatly appreciated.
> >
> >    - If Google takes over the world and all apps become a Native Client
> >      (may be even other browsers^^;), this port may be useful^^;
> >
> > -- Yoshiki
> >