[self-interest] Re: Implementation

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Douglas Atique wrote:
> 
> Hello, all. (BTW, I have noticed the list is rather quiet lately.)
> Here is a little question about the VM.
> We know there are three kinds of sends: unary, binary and keyword. I
> have been looking at the runtime part of the VM code and found out about
> an assembly routine named
> oop CallSelf(nmethod method, oop receiver, oop arg)

I only found a C++ routine with that name, in the file runtime/shell.c
though there is a function called EnterSelf that is written in
Sparc assembly.

> which seems to me the part of code that really evaluates a send with
> compiled native methods, returning an oop. As you might have noticed,
> this function takes only one argument. In my opinion, to the send. My
> question is: how can the VM evaluate binary and keyword sends if it can
> give CallSelf only 1 argument?

Actually, binary messages have only one argument so this wouldn't
be a problem. Only keywords messages with two or more arguments
would fail to work here.

> I hope not to be too simplistic, but I am not very fluent in SPARC
> assembly and didn't understand much of the code. It also seems that all
> this is mixed in intricate ways with the Self threading system.

If we look at all the calls that are made to this routine:

  memory/oop.c:  oop res = CallSelf(this, nm);
  memory/oop.c:    res = CallSelf(doBlock, nm);
  memory/oop.c:    res2 = CallSelf(protectBlock, nm2,
                              original_aborting ? Memory->nilObj : res);
  runtime/shell.c:      res = CallSelf(Memory->lobbyObj, c);
  parser/expr.c:  oop res = CallSelf(Memory->lobbyObj, c);

we can see that only one call even makes any use of the argument,
and none need two or more.

-- Jecel


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