Port coordination?

[Jonathan Springer]

Pieter Libin wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> nowadays it seems that quite some people/organizations are working on
> various ports of the j2se platform.
> However, porting the virtual machine to new architectures requires the
> writing of quite some non-trivial platform specific code (os, os_cpu
> dir).
> I think it would make sense to provide a more portable replacement for
> this native part.
> This would help porting the j2se platform a lot, and might make the
> transition from j2me > j2se easier as well
> (http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9800679-39.html).
> 
> Does anyone know wether such a mechanism could be technically feasible?

To support the compilers (c1, c2), there's just no getting around the
need to describe how to generate code for a specific architecture.
Maybe you could do something outlandish like call gcc every time you
wanted to generate a blob, but....

You could come a lot closer with something interpreter-only using
CC_INTERP, though still there is asm for some things.  Unfortunately
the CORE target was removed around b12, and it would be some work to
get it back.

-Jonathan


-- 
Jonathan Springer     |
Reservoir Labs, Inc.  |  http://www.reservoir.com/