Re: If it works, this might be interesting


<rhyde@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1180385189.431973.92990@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.openlina.com/index.html

Lina is a VM that allows one to run unmodified binaries under Linux,
Windows, Mac OS, and other OSes with the look and feel of the native
OS. Software is written to the Linux API. Don't know the details, and
I have my doubts as systems like this have come and gone in the past,
but it would be interesting to develop GUI apps that you write once
and can run on all these OSes.
hLater,
Randy Hyde


but, at what cost?...

this is a problem of nearly any VM.

nearly anything the VM does, apart from the ordinary, risks becomming a
burden, their benefit a hinderence, ...


this is why I try to write hopefully portable code, albeit with what I am
doing now (runtime assembly and compilation), this is hardly an easy task
(windows and linux are my target OSs, and x86 and x86-64 my target archs,
with linux and x86-64 currently a lower priority, but I had verified before
that at least in a trivial way, my stuff works in linux on x86-64...).

anything clearly different (such as linux on PPC), no go...
well, unless I wrote a PPC assembler, and yet another version of the 'RPNIL'
compiler (don't even have x86 finished yet, much less x86-64, or anything
really beyond that...).


oh well, at least I have part of my assembler linking and loading in itself
(note: from object files), and the ability to patch code (ie: replace old
functions with new versions at runtime, ...) is maybe interesting. an
example would be with a frontend UI, altering a chunk of C code and watching
the app's behavior change in real time, well, assuming it doesn't
segfault...

it may be useful at some point to make some provisions for a debugging
interface. at present GDB fails to say anything useful if the crash happens
to be in dynamically-compiled code (function '??').


but, will it ever amount to anything (vs, say, LLVM or TinyC?...)?
doubtful...


so, what is the cost?

like any VM, it has its own tweaks and incompatibilities. its own existence
is its weakness. sadly, existing OS's/HW hardly do much of anything to
really allow software (at least in C land) to be reflective or
self-writing/modifying.

trying to keep the overhead as low as I can reasonably do so (ie: if I need
any kind of FFI, I have already lost), but all this may well be asking too
much.

any VM is still a VM...



pointless hobbyism really though...



.

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