[Mono-devel-list] Mano - Mono on PalmOS

[Wolf Logan]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sergey Chaban" <serge at wildwestsoftware.com>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2003 5:32 AM


> So interpreter must be an armlet itself?

it doesn't need to be, but good Palm design indicates that it should be. the
interpreter (or JIT compiler) is a computer-bound tight loop that doesn't
rely on OS support. if it's written in 68K code, the interpreter itself will
be interpreted by the PACE interpreter, and things get too sluggish.

> Tramp code itself doesn't use any storage except for the stack (it may
need to call
> external routines though, e.g. to convert strings), but since it's purpose
is to call
> external code (platform APIs in particular) these conditions seems too
limiting.
>
> Given all of the above maybe it's better/easier to generate 68K code for
trampolines?
> (Here we are talking about interpreter only).

that's possible, as long as they're relatively short (in a time-sense, that
is, not too much time is spent executing them). again, the only time user
code is actually executing on the processor is inside an ARMlet. at all
other times, the processor is either executing OS routines or PACE code.
generating trampoline code in 68K will mean it'll be interpreted by PACE,
which means it's outside the scope of the ARM code inside an ARMlet.