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.
14:22
Slower progress these past few days.
14:51
At the initialization stage I can do four things at once. Move the input register to generate operations that adjust for input arguments, loading of the StackMapTable if any exists, decoding instructions into byte ops, and initializing the state of locals and the stack. If a SMT exists then it can be assigned post work.
15:03
However there may be concurrency issues as memory will need to be synchronized afterwards. But I can just have the worker threads return the value they expect rather than whatever.
19:54
I have this idea on the String class. Since Strings are a bunch of UTF-16 characters, some languages might go crazy and others might not. One thing I can do to reduce String memory usage in the case of English language or ones that are all below 255 in value is to have two byte arrays where one part is least significant and the other part is most significant. So if there is at least one value above 255 then both arrays will be used. This will cause a slowdown in some general usages of the String class as checks will need to be done to see if there is a higher buffer around. Although there are many other languages, English and by extension Latin is the most commonly used. So it depends if a speed decrease is desired over less memory being used. In general many strings will be very short rather than very long. And also there would be an extra array that needs to be handled by the garbage collector. Having persistent strings is bad since they would just be wasted away. So it would be in general best to use just char arrays as using bytes would complicate matters.