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

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Wed, 4 May 2011 13:48:46 +0200,
Igor Stasenko wrote:
> 
> 
> On 4 May 2011 08:18, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> 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.
> >
> 
> I recommend you to take a look on CMakeVMMaker.
> It is written in smalltalk, and generating cmake configuration files.
> Its also much simpler than cmake configs made by Ian (because i
> started making it without too deep knowledge
> about cmake), and actually i didn't wanted to make it too clever, like
> detecting a platform-specific subtleties,
> because then it ties your build to the platform where you compiling VM
> and therefore makes it harder to do a cross-compilation.
>
> So, with CMakeVMMaker you could just start from creating a new class
> with own configuration , and then gradually
> get a working configuration which (cross)compiles VM for your specific
> target, with your specific flags and
> set of plugins which proven to work.
> 
> And of course, you can take a look at existing configurations for examples.

  Sounds good!  Cross compiling in mind from the beginning is very
good.

> >  - If Google takes over the world and all apps become a Native Client
> >    (may be even other browsers^^;), this port may be useful^^;
> >
> 
> Yes, indeed. I like NaCl, because it will allow us to just run VM,
> instead of adopting it to browser in form of plugin.
> 
> Do you have any description, what you need to do to get started
> building VM for NaCl?
> It would be interesting to read.

  The documentation on it is scarse and some contradictions, but
basically all you need is reading header files and the "Pepper C
API" section of:

http://code.google.com/chrome/nativeclient/docs/reference/pepperc/index.html

with some guessworks and try and error.

-- Yoshiki