2016/03/14

12:39

Looking at synonyms for descriptor.

12:41

I suppose one which is not listed could work, perhaps symbol.

14:31

Actually, something which would be interesting would be to have a virtual machine with CPU core potential. That is, if the host hardware supports it or the architecture is sane (such as MIPS, PowerPC, and SPARC) there can be accelerated execution of a virtual machine. If hardware (or software) acceleration is not supported, then an emulator could be used instead. An emulator would have to be used for cross architecture support anyway. However, I suppose the virtual systems would be very minimal (and likely a clone of Xen or QEMU). All the hardware would be emulated, while the CPU could be ran native or just emulated. This would be handy for example to switch to SquirrelJME and then have some kind of legacy system running. I could even have a Java interface (NIO channels) to serial/parallel ports and potentially for VGA screens. So say you get a new device such as the MIPS Creator CI40 and you have some ancient DOS program from the 80s you still use. You could run that in a virtual machine and interact with it through Java. Although not as portable it would allow people to run native code, either at full speed or with emulation. At least with emulation code would run anywhere at a cost. There could also be interfaces for (a)synchronous reading and writing of memory if it is needed for example. It would also be handy for testing and bootstrapping SquirrelJME so that it can run on its own virtual machine.

14:42

Hypothetically it can also be used to support different architectures without access to the hardware, provided it is a compatible implementation. There would have to be a hardware configuration however to emulate an existing system for this to work. I would likely make the virtual machines very minimal to fit in a small footprint. The virtual machine being ran could also be managed by the run-time for memory usage and such.