[self-interest] Re: Self on Linux

[Douglas Atique]

Gordon,
I (and maybe many more members of the list) was very excited about your
quick progress. The fact is that many people have tried to port and many
of these have given up (as Jecel told me once). I took great care to avoid
giving up by designing a plan. I am in the first steps, which consist of
studying the source code and the Self papers and understanding why things
are the way they are. I have had great difficulties in understanding all
the runtime stuff because I have never seriously programmed in assembly,
neither for SPARC nor for Intel. One of the key pieces of knowledge one
should have to do this port (and it seems that you have it) is know
assembly and the inner workings of the stack and function calls. I haven't
yet written or changed a single line of Self VM code, but I have printed
all those files on paper to form a big book (still without any bindings)
which is one of my favourites. All this explained, let me see your
questions...

On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Gordon Cichon wrote:

> datique at pcs.usp.br wrote:
> > When I first thought of having Self run on an Intel platform, I thought of Windows, which was the system I had then. Then, I noticed that it would be too much work at once to bring all the Unix facilities to Windows (I tried the excellent Cygwin32 and mingw32 ports of gcc, but that was not enough). Then I thought of having Self on SCO OpenServer, of which I had a noncommercial copy. As things were not easy, I cut all down to the smallest step I could think of. And that was Solaris x86.
> > It looks like Gordon has solved the biggest problems of the port on Linux, but now I have spent the last six months studying the inner workings of the Self system and I think it's not time to stop. I always wanted to learn how such a great system works. And who knows what else can be achieved when more people try different solutions to the same problem...
> 
> Maybe we could get earlier to working system if we 
> share our results. 
> 
> How did you handle the stuff with the code generator?  
What stuff?
> What did you do with the stack frame? 
I don't understand the stack, frame, vframe, halfFrame, and all that yet.
I think this is one of the hardest parts of the VM (yes, harder than the
SIC).
> 
> Do you think, recompile.c or convert.c have to be 
> functional as long as SIC is disabled?
Very simply stated, it seems that the SIC will only run if the lookup
system (or someone else) decides that a method has run frequently enough
to be considered a critical method. I don't remember exactly in which file
this is. But if you don't want SIC running, why don't you make it think
that no method has been called frequently enough so that it never thinks
about recompiling?
Feel free to ask me questions, I will answer them as far as I know the
answers. In this respect, I think we could try to get some help from the
Self Group members who read this list.
Douglas
> 
> -gordon
> 
> -- 
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Gordon Cichon          email: Gordon at Cichon.de
> 


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