[Mono-list] Updates on Ximian's end

[Miguel de Icaza]

> 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?  

Yes, this is correct.

The code will just have to embed binary representation of the code it
will emit.  No big deal.

> I know of a
> couple of things that do this, some of which have already been mentioned 
> here (NJMT and Lightning).  

I also researched Lightning.  It is a general abstraction that does
too much for you.  The code generator approach is a lot better in my
opinion than targeting a virtual machine (Lightning is a virtual
machine that "translates" from its architecture set to the target
machine). 

> 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.

Neither am I.  

My plan is to work on a tool like IBURG/GBURG over the next few days,
and write the machine description for Intel 386.  

This weekend Sean and I are laying out the tree structure for the Mono
VM so we can also get Paolo's initial work in (we just need to make
sure we share the same data structures, etc).

Miguel.