[Mono-list] Updates on Ximian's end

[Kevin Scott]

In message <m3bsmrm44i.fsf@erandi.helixcode.com>, Miguel de Icaza writes:
>
>  On the JIT side of things: I will spend the weekend figuring out our
>strategy regarding ORP and other approaches like LBURG and GBURG.
>Given the special requirements of CIL on the byte codes generated it
>seems pretty obvious that an LBURG/GBURG approach for our JIT will be
>a better approach than using existing Java-based JITers (ORP and Kaffe
>included). 
>
>  Basically I will be writing a code generator generator for this
>specific task (for more details read the `A retargeting C compiler'
>book which goes in depth into those issues).

Folks might also want to have a look at "Engineering a Simple, Efficient
Code Generator Generator" by Chris Fraser, Dave Hanson, and Todd Proebsting.
http://www.research.microsoft.com/~drh/pubs/iburg.pdf.  This describes
the precursor of code generator generator used in 'A Retargetable C 
Compiler'. 

Miguel, have you thought about what you're going to do to emit the binary
encodings of x86 instructions.  Your generated code generators are going
to have to emit binary rather than assembly language, right?  I know of a
couple of things that do this, some of which have already been mentioned 
here (NJMT and Lightning).  I'm interested in your (and anyone else's)
thoughts on a good way to do this.  I have need of a similar tool for a 
separate project and am not convinced that rolling something from scratch 
is a bad idea.

-K

--
Kevin Scott                          PhD Student,  Dept. of Computer Science
kscott@cs.virginia.edu                       University of Virginia       
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jks6b            +1 804 982 2391 (work)