2014/10/05

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.

12:08

Hairball could be useful if it is a script based system where I can write my own complicated scripts that are similar to the language itself. However, there should just be platform definitions and such, where hairball just does all of that automatically as needed. It can also perform specific runtime compilation also through the runtime system that I will write. The major thing is I have to code the runtime system right and once. So what will be the scope of the runtime system then? Does it just do compilation of code as needed? Does it execute and interpret code at all? I believe the runtime should just perform compilation of code and such, while I can have separated kernel stuff as needed. For the kernel I can have tons of packages for separate architectures or I can combine them as one. Multiple architectures simplifies things and the package builder can just set some subpackages like they do not exist at all.

12:25

However, keeping all of the code in one singular package for every architecture and such will complicate the build process because that would need to handled. Putting all of the kernel packages in the standard pkg directory will be messy, so I will put them all in a new directory, kpkg. I know previously I have merged these, but pkg will be userspace and kpkg will be kernel space, and that is a huge difference in function. Putting them all in the same directory will make it difficult to determine what is a kernel package and what is a userspace package.

12:30

Now I need an execution system. How will binaries be loaded and handled? I want the execution system to act as if it were on the end of a compiler, so if there is a method call to somewhere it will act as if it were an actual method call of sorts. So when a class is loaded, it will just be recompiled into some native form by running through it and such. Then once it exists in memory it can be directly jumped into. So I will need some kind of system where I can wrap native execution via some virtualized native call and such.

13:42

I will need a good ahead of time compiler that can be used when the kernel is being compiled and while the kernel is executing (for user code), so it must be efficient although it does not have to be super fast (since compilation is done once and cached, ignoring anything that changes which would require recompilation). It also must have toggleable code generation so the primary package is not used in a special way, that is normal userspace code being recompiled cannot access the very special stuff in that package.