2015/04/17

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.

10:51

I will need something to keep an eye on the values and types a register will be. And that will be what Mapping is for.

13:29

A build environment would be nice on my outdated Palm OS PDA. I could write a very basic Linux user mode emulation environment that emulates Linux MIPS systems. Linux because it is the simplest and a usermode interface would simplify things as I would not need to write PCI/USB handlers and such. There would be no sound though. But if I could run OpenJDK albiet very slowly it could work out when it is needed. It would be insanely slow but I would have at least a bit more capable bootstrap environment for my OS.

14:02

At the minimum I would need a basic Java 8 run-time.

14:21

I need to create a compiler front end, sort of like SimpleCompiler but a bit different. It will use the ServiceLoader and be optionally specified a ClassLoader. I could code it in a way where it can be used by hairball and the kernel itself so that if I want a completely different compiler backend it can be chosen instead. Then when building the kernel and such, I could specify that a backend could be specified as needed.

14:43

It would be best if I decoupled the dynarec, that way I can easily change it as needed. Then also possible add the ability to use different recompilers if I ever need to change it in the future. The the kernel-platform packages will need a requirement of not depending on the dynarec for anything. Then I can modify hairball to support multiple backends.

15:40

The form stuff is fine, but their dependencies on the existing dynarec needs to go.

16:17

Going to also remove FormCodeProfile as it is extra unneeded gunk.

16:29

FormCodeProfile is just going to have meta data, which the translated code that is read from a class file will use. That way when the decoder is run on the Java class file it uses that instead of a direct constant pool reference which gets ugly, so it will be preconverted although it might not be completely perfect.

16:31

I am going to need new names for the existing narf and poit dynarec stuff. No forget that. I just need to cleanup some things in it, such as splitting off the Java register creation code.

17:41

Now that everything has been moved it is all broken. So now comes the fixing part.

18:12

I believe the best thing so that the kernel building does not mess with the package manager, seeing as they are both hairball would be to split the kernel building stuff off. So there would be k8-hairball and k8-hairball-os. Hairball could still keep some other stuff, but it would not have to depend on the core-compiler-support library. And like before splitting things up, I can make changes to the kernel builder and other things without messing with the package manager stuff since that is virtually staying the same regardless.

18:55

Transcompiler.Lang can just become String to keep it simple, since all it contains is a single string.

19:09

Now onto narf-compiler as narf-core now can be compiled.

19:16

CPUData completely removed the need for FormCodeProfile.

19:49

Now onto the PowerPC NARF backend.

20:01

PPC Compiler done, now onto the class file loader which will require more work than the others since most of the work as been simple renaming.

20:07

I shall return to it after I eat.

20:19

Or rather, while my food cooks.

20:28

Looks like it might be best to just rewrite it and bring in any goodies. Some of the stuff in the binary loader is itself ugly and I have been planning to rewrite the class file loader, so perhaps that is to be done now.

23:42

Well the old Java decoder to NARF DecodedMethod is quite ugly itself, and it depends heavily on the old Java binary loader. So I will have to rewrite that also. However

23:56

Day almost up. My code is split up even more. Right now I have a TODO in the Java class loader. Fails in about 6 to 9 seconds on this laptop. The main thing is since I am currently only rewriting the class loader, everything else can remain cached. But the class loader and the the decompiler are very bad technical debt lying around.