scopes writeup

[Samuel Audet]

Hi,

I would like to hear more about what John mentions below about being 
"challenging enough" and leaving work for the future. I would go one 
step further. The Substrate VM team already has something working as 
part of their C interface, and they did not need to parse anything to 
get it working. It does not try to do as much as Panama, but they did 
what is in my opinion most important: A simpler more efficient variant 
of JNI. If we could get this bit of Panama stabilized first, instead of 
trying to parse everything, that would be great I think. What do you 
think? Or if that is not possible, how is Panama different from 
Substrate VM such that the same approach would not work?

I am starting the get the impression that Panama is basically 
reimplementing portions of LLVM in Java as part of SystemABI. How much 
effort would it take to, for example, implement the required subset of 
the Java ABI in LLVM? Doing it that way, we would not need to test the 
C/C++ ABI, at least, making it possible instead to reuse tests from the 
JDK itself, or am I talking nonsense here? Looks like that might be 
challenging as well: http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8189173. In any case, 
it would be great if we could have a discussion about these things 
instead of having OpenJDK dictate everything!

Samuel

On 1/30/19 5:03 AM, John Rose wrote:
> Currently we are focusing on accurately extracting all possible
> raw APIs, and providing efficient access to them.  This is
> challenging enough for now.  So you won't see much help
> for civilizing yet.  I expect that folks will start to experiment
> with civilizing layers when the raw extraction mechanisms
> stabilize.