Truffle Language with Binary File input

[Jaroslav Tulach]

Replying to mailing list, as this looks like a generally useful question...

> > Begin forwarded message:
> > Hello.
> > 
> > What is the preferred way of implementing a Truffle language that
> > takes a binary file as input?
> > 
> > I have a binary file containing the bytecode instructions for the
> > teaching language, and a reader that will read this binary format into
> > an in-memory datastructure.
> > 
> > Currently I am overriding :
> >   protected Object eval (Source code)
> > 
> > in the TruffleLanguage class.
> > 
> > I have tried calling:
> >   code.getInputStream()
> > 
> > to get access to the underlying binary stream, but this doesn't work
> > because the file has been read as a character stream and already has
> > UTF-8 byte order marks inserted everywhere which is corrupting the
> > bytecode format.
> > 
> > Thanks!

Yes, we need to get ready for TruffleLanguage to be able to read non-text 
data. Right now there is some initial sketch of support for MIME type and I 
think we should built on top of it:

1. MIME type should be associated with Source
2. TruffleVM.eval should take Source as its parameter

That way it should be possible to send binary file to TruffleVM as

  s = Source.fromBytes(yourArray, "my binary data", "application/g-zip");
  truffleVM.eval(s);

and really use s.getInputStream() inside of your TruffleLanguage.parse (there 
is no eval method anymore). Would that work for you?

If so, there is just one remaining thing to do: find somebody who's going to 
implement this.
-jt