[Vm-dev] Re: [Poll] Who is interested in, thinking about, or already contributing to a 64-bit OpenSmalltalk VM for Windows?

[Nicolas Cellier]

2016-07-05 15:40 GMT+02:00 marcel.taeumel <Marcel.Taeumel at hpi.de>:

>
> Nicolas Cellier wrote
> > I don't promise to spend any time on it, but I've inquired a bit a few
> > months ago.
> > The 1st thing required is to convert a bunch of (int) type declaration
> > into
> > sqint in platforms/win32 because they're not compatible in 64bits.
> >
> > 2016-07-05 11:20 GMT+02:00 marcel.taeumel &lt;
>
> > Marcel.Taeumel@
>
> > &gt;:
> >
> >>
> >> Hi, there.
> >>
> >> I happily observe the recent efforts to make 64-bit VMs stable for Linux
> >> and
> >> Mac OSX.
> >>
> >> Although Tobias and myself agreed to support the Windows platform in
> >> terms
> >> of internal and external plugins such as SqueakSSL and FilePlugin,
> adding
> >> 64-bit seems like a lot of work. We have only so much time.
> >>
> >> Who's out there interested in, thinking about, or already contributing
> to
> >> a
> >> 64-bit OpenSmalltalk VM for Windows?
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> Marcel
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> View this message in context:
> >>
> http://forum.world.st/Poll-Who-is-interested-in-thinking-about-or-already-contributing-to-a-64-bit-OpenSmalltalk-VM-for-Wi-tp4904953.html
> >> Sent from the Squeak VM mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> >>
>
> Hi Nicolas,
>
>
Hi Marcel,


> if we target Cygwin as a build environment, this might be worth noticing:
> https://cygwin.com/faq.html#faq.programming.64bitporting
>
>
As currently generated, the Spur Vm for 64 bits expects sizeof(long) == 8.
So it is cygwin64 x86_64 compatible, but not so much MSVC... (or mingw-w64
variants...)
IMO, this is the easiest target. then we could inquire about alternate
compilers.


> If we (eventually?) target MS Visual Studio (resp. its C compiler), the
> code
> might look different. Not sure.
>
> In the Windows (kernel) code, I noticed the use of typedefs, which we could
> also establish in the vm's windows-specific platform code:
>
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff381404(v=vs.85).aspx
>
>
I wonder if we could manage to write code that compiles in both Cygwin
> 64-bit and the (free) MS Visual C/C++ compiler:
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41151
>
>
Yes, it's doable, it's a matter of defining the sq* types and sticking to
these types.
But that might mean revising VMMaker package to avoid direct references to
long/unsigned long/, as well as some of the platforms/* files...


> ... or maybe MS Visual C/C++ only? It would remove Cygwin as a layer of
> indirection between dev tools and execution platform...  *duck-and-run* :-D
>
>
Using MSVC requires additional support like atomic operations (see
../../platforms/Cross/vm/sqAtomicOps.h)

Overall, it should be really simple (and cheap?) to setup a Windows dev
> environment for VM developers. Maybe for real, maybe in a VirtualBox only.
> This helps Eliot and other cross-platform VM developers to debug like they
> are doing now.
>
>
Using IDE has a lot of advantages, but maintaining the IDE-specific or even
worse IDE-version-specific project files is not sustainable
For these reasons, Eliot removed the Xcode projects for Mac, I don't think
re-introducing them for windows would be a good idea.
Instead, I much much prefer to generate the project files via cmake.
The question remains whether we maintain the cmakelists.txt or generate
them from Smalltalk (like Pharo VM)

I like the idea of a virtual machine prepared for dev, but what about:
- license (unless we can redistribute windows 10?)
- security (download a virtual machine with unknown installed software,
backdoors, etc... )


> Best,
> Marcel
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://forum.world.st/Poll-Who-is-interested-in-thinking-about-or-already-contributing-to-a-64-bit-OpenSmalltalk-VM-for-Wi-tp4904953p4905015.html
> Sent from the Squeak VM mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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