Any documentation that you write as part of your investigation would be
welcome contributions.
On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Michael Clagett <mclag...@hotmail.com>wrote:
> One constructive criticism type comment, if you'll permit me. While
> what I say directly below is absolutely true, it's true on a micro level.
> At the broader level, the heavy use of (sometimes lengthy) quotations to
> feed workhorse words like "define-sub-primitive" make understanding what's
> going on quite difficult. Although I realize the bootstrapping mechanism
> is not a general area of interest to many, I think something on the order
> of about 25 well-placed comments prefacing some of the more extensive
> quotations would help improve readability tremendously, just in case
> someone needs to understand the internals of this mechanism.
>
> Just a thought, offered in a spirit of complete good will and overall
> general awe at the care and discipline that has gone into this work.
>
> ------------------------------
> From: mclag...@hotmail.com
> To: factor-talk@lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: RE: [Factor-talk] Any way of making sense of what's in the boot
> image?
> Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 05:28:45 +0000
>
>
> Been looking at some of the x86 assembler code. Damn! All I can say is
> that I wish to hell I had had Factor when I wrote my own. Quite a bit
> different approach, but the clarity and succinctness is tantalizing.
>
> ------------------------------
> From: mclag...@hotmail.com
> To: factor-talk@lists.sourceforge.net
> Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:46:38 +0000
> Subject: Re: [Factor-talk] Any way of making sense of what's in the boot
> image?
>
> Thank you, Joe, for the quick response. It was actually the information
> in the "such as" clause of your last sentence that I was looking for. I
> don't mean for you to take the time out to document the meaning of these
> different constants, but if it is documented somewhere other than in the
> creators' heads, I would love to be directed to it. Not a big deal,
> because I'm sure that when I get to seeing them used in the boot-image
> initialization code, all will become clear. Still, it might help me better
> understand what's being done at the make-image level to know.
> > Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 12:21:52 -0400
> > From: arc...@gmail.com
> > To: factor-talk@lists.sourceforge.net
> > Subject: Re: [Factor-talk] Any way of making sense of what's in the boot
> image?
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Michael Clagett <mclag...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > Here's an obscure question that is of interest to me in my current
> quest,
> > > but probably not to anyone else. So if there is a better forum for me
> to
> > > ask such things, I would love to be instructed; until I hear otherwise,
> > > however, I will continue to use this list.
> > >
> > > Is there any place where I can penetrate the meaning of the following
> > > constants:
> > >
> > > CONSTANT: rt-dlsym 0
> > > CONSTANT: rt-entry-point 1
> > > CONSTANT: rt-entry-point-pic 2
> > > CONSTANT: rt-entry-point-pic-tail 3
> > > CONSTANT: rt-here 4
> > > CONSTANT: rt-this 5
> > > CONSTANT: rt-literal 6
> > > CONSTANT: rt-untagged 7
> > > CONSTANT: rt-megamorphic-cache-hits 8
> > > CONSTANT: rt-vm 9
> > > CONSTANT: rt-cards-offset 10
> > > CONSTANT: rt-decks-offset 11
> > > CONSTANT: rt-exception-handler 12
> > > CONSTANT: rt-dlsym-toc 13
> > > CONSTANT: rt-inline-cache-miss 14
> > > CONSTANT: rt-safepoint 15
> > >
> > > So far I've only encountered rt-here and I've only seen it encoded
> into a
> > > relocation entry and not really used anywhere yet. But this strikes me
> as
> > > the kind of thing it would be useful to know as I am slogging through
> this
> > > stuff.
> > >
> > > Not a hugely pressing question, as I'm sure I'll muddle through it.
> But if
> > > anyone has a moment to illuminate, it would be nice.
> >
> > Those are relocation record types. When the compiler generates code
> > for a word, it also needs to generate relocation entries every time it
> > references another word in a jump or call statement, much like a
> > native C compiler needs to do for symbols in other modules.
> > The VM uses these relocation entries to update the operands of jump
> > and call instructions when code is written to the code heap, when the
> > code heap is compacted, or if code is moved in memory for any reason.
> > The different rt-* constants are used to describe what kind of object
> > a relocation refers to, such as a foreign function in a DLL (dlsym), a
> > word entry point (entry-point-*), the current address (here), etc.
> >
> > -Joe
> >
> >
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