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.
10:27
Had a dream about the user interface in k8. Looked kind of like motif and very simplified. Gray menu bars on the top and bottom, an orange desktop.
18:32
The single and double vertical pipe notation in the PowerPC manual can get a bit confusing. One means to shift to the left by adding more zeroes, and the other is an OR for an alternative selection. To quote "The symbol || is used to describe the concatenation of two values. For example, 010 || 111 is the same as 010111.". (RA|0) or similar means that if zero is specified then it is zero and not the value of a register.
18:38
One thing though is my binding level. When do I want stuff to bind? Immedietly or when it is used? Well actually I can have method level binding. For example a method can refer to a static field in a class. I can have there be a pointer function which is executed to bind the stuff. However that would be slow because it would be called everytime just to read a value from memory. Instead, anything that requires loading and such could be done at the start of a method if it has no yet been initialized. Method references can just be lazy initialized and linked at run-time. Then that method can load another class which is initialized and it just continued on and on until everything has been bound. This would at least be the in between of either binding everything at once when it might not be used, or being very lazy and always doing late binding. Not going to use self rewriting code at all because that is ugly. Executable code is expected to be read-only but executable like in ROM. This would reduce exploits and would also allow for emulators to cache along with the CPU doing something similar.
18:59
I suppose what I can do for long/double similar to Java is that it takes up to slots in the stack and register set. I can exploit this for 32-bit architectures to make things a bit easier. I do need to store the upper 32-bits somewhere. With POIT I just take the Java byte-code as is for the most part and perform operations on it.
19:06
Any classes I generate will need to be tested however to determime if they will work. I could most likely write a program which compiles on a host system via C which provides a mini-testing environment for executing things. This would be a simple call to mprotect after loading the recompiled binary into target memory.
19:17
For security purposes, I will have to put a ban on linking to anything that is in the kernel namespace area. Otherwise it may be possible to exploit userspace applications by calling kernel-only methods a specific way.
19:26
I will also have to determine how garbage collection is to be handled and how to tag objects which are used in generated code. I might just have a call be made when reference types change.