Re: If it works, this might be interesting

On May 28, 4:11 pm, "cr88192" <cr88...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<r...@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?...

They claim it's not that bad.


this is a problem of nearly any VM.

VM's generally cost about 10% in performance for normal stuff. Given
that we're talking user interface programming here, that's almost
inconsequential.


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

But 99% of the time you're doing ordinary stuff. What's your point?


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...).

That's cool. It's the same thing I'm doing with the HLA standard
library. OTOH, suppose you didn't have to put in all this effort?
Particularly on the GUI interface part of the library code. I don't
know about you, but giving up 10% performance for portability -- IF IT
WORKS -- is a *good* tradeoff.



anything clearly different (such as linux on PPC), no go...

Obviously.


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...

For a compiler or other command-line tool, this isn't very interesting
technology. After all, achieving portability with such applications is
fairly straight-forward. The real benefit to something like Lina is
with GUI apps. That's what this package is all about.



so, what is the cost?

Read the white paper at the URL I provided. They talk about this.


like any VM, it has its own tweaks and incompatibilities. its own existence
is its weakness.

Again, I want to point out that I said "this is interesting...if it
works." As for it's own existence being it's weakness, I'm afraid
you've lost me there.

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.

Uh, with a simple linker option you can make your code writeable.
However, note that writing self-modifying code on a modern x86 CPU is
generally a bad idea. You might try reading the Intel and AMD
documentation for details if you don't realize this.


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.

I have no clue what you're talking about.


any VM is still a VM...

So?
I think you are confusing an interpretive virtual machine like Java's
with the virtual machine implementation that Lina is using. The two
are not at all the same. You do realize we're talking about native
code execution here, right? The only time anything funny happens is
when you make a system call. Otherwise, it's strict x86 execution.


pointless hobbyism really though...

Again, you've lost me. Are you talking about your code, Lina, what?
hLater,
Randy Hyde



.

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