2014/11/18

DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.

00:09

A rather nice IDE, however it is really sluggish when it comes to typing as the words I type appear about as second later. Oh well. Maybe when my OS gets far enough I can use NetBeans on that instead. In general though for my code, my TypeInfo class is far too complex and does everything for all types of input. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to subclass TypeInfo and have inner classes be TypeInfos so to speak. This way they have specific information and do not share some global state (where some of them are null). The only main problem are poly types that mean multiple things, such as class bounds which could also be an exact type bound. Perhaps interfaces could be leveraged for this.

00:20

Actually for TypeInfo bounds, the exact stuff can be exactly what something is so that there is no exact bound. So I would at most need an interface that indicates the specific sub type can be a part of a bound list. So right now TypeInfo is 1680 lines long (and I do not have type parameters implemented). It contains a bunch of convoluted code for various cases and decoder loops, so I need to simplify that greatly. Another thing that will need to be done is switching to a ProgramBuilder for generation of SSA codes, that way it can be done efficiently.

12:02

So now work begins on moving the TypeInfo stuff over to a new and improved system.

12:21

How about rather than decoding it when it is passed, I do a lazy encode and just partition it based on the characters inside of it. Since descriptors are full of unqualified names and those special unqualified characters are used for the generic bits and such. But that would not work because method indicators are legal in class names.

20:38

The main unknown thing byte code wise is volatiles and getfield/putfield. Are these volatiles handled at the byte code level or at the language level? Because if they were at the bytecode level then the local variables or stack would have to be mapped to the volatile variable.

21:11

Appears that it is virtual machine level as volatile and non-volatile byte code is exactly the same in my tests.

21:19

Due to the volatiles and such, I will need to depend on other clases being available at runtime and using their information, so I will need a system to keep track and load them as needed. However, loading everything could be very slow because the entire library will end up being loaded, so the only thing that will request loading of other classes is the class compiler. This has to be written so that it can work for the kernel also. So there would need to be separate commit levels and such. And since classes rely on TypeInfo, they must be decoded. So for the fastest speed possible there must be a lazy decode of type information. A type could be loaded by a class and stuff might have already been cached when another class was processed. And the bus stuff has to be done so that it does not require a load of normal class files if the stuff is already compiled, and if it has not changed.

22:03

This class bus system will be the bulk of the kernel classpath searches and such, the kernel will have the boot classpath while userspace processes (that share the same classpath) will have sub-busses, if the parent level ClassBus lacks a class, it is then searched for in the sub-bus. Then the ClassBus system can replace most of the link stuff because it would handle the searching of classes when needed, although it will still need something that looks at a JAR or directory for class files. A parent class path will have to protect packages from getting new stuff added (so client classpaths cannot mess around with java.lang stuff and such), this sealing would be always on.

23:39

I think right now it is mostly guess work on how everything will operate, since I lack a kernel. I need to really guess how the kernel will operate before I even write it, which can be difficult. One incorrect move and things get invalidated. Perhaps I will have to implement my previously dismissed idea of writing the kernel in Java and having an actual system running on an existing JVM. Then once I get the compilation system setup and all of that I can then port it over to real hardware and such. However such a kernel would have to be setup so that it is efficient and does not run like garbage or break on real hardware. So the main important thing would be handling Java being like a CPU without an MMU. Then there would need to be recompilation to run code on the actual machine, but this can be done by recompiler that take byte code and turn it into byte code. Although the byte code to run on the JVM will be very magical. Thread.suspend() and Thread.resume() give me multi- threaded control although those methods are deprecated because they are deadlock-prone, so if I were to avoid using those I would have all the threads running at once or make a cooperative type system in the code.

23:03

I believe completely avoiding the use of assembly is suicidal as I need some kind of initialization system, however the assembly could just be used to jump into a giant precompiled Java blob of the bootloader after initializing some native callbacks to do somethings which are very special.

23:16

At least permitting assembly relaxes the need to make super special compilers that do magical stuff (like I planned on doing).

25:35

I believe my main problem is being too complex too soon, although doing it the semi-complex work will save time and implementation future work without any headaches hopefully. If I did a straight Java byte code to machine code then I would have to write byte code recompilers over and over again so what I am currently doing is good. MIPS will probably end up being the first supported thing because it is so simple to code for and a nice instruction set, there is also QEMU's support of it also.