Hello all, A few changes in master and wip-rtl.
First of all, I have changed the on-disk format for .go files to be ELF, even for the old Guile 2.0-style bytecode. This increases the file size somewhat, though the memory footprint is the same. What it gives us, though, is extensibility. In that regard, I have rebased wip-rtl on top of master. If you have existing wip-rtl checkouts, you'll have to be sure that they are current. Finally, I merged in the DWARF parser from guile-dlhacks. It's not used yet. As I said in my mail to Noah, my first idea is to emit DWARF based on macro-instructions in the assembly. We'll see. For me, my next steps are: 1) Convert the ELF parser and linker to use symbols instead of the raw ELF codes, as the DWARF parser does. It's more convenient and not significantly different, performance-wise. 2) Add enough debugging information so that procedure-name works, and that we can determine the bounds of procedures. (Determining where a procedure ends is a precondition for being able to disassemble it!) 3) Create tests for all of the opcodes. This task is somewhat decoupled from the previous tasks; if people want to help out, see libguile/vm-engine.c and test-suite/tests/rtl.test. 4) Update the tools (debugger, frame printer, etc) to be able to deal with the new debugging format. There are also some fundamentals of the VM that need nailing down. One is that the VM needs some more operations that take immediate operands. That's pretty easy. We should also think about inline caches. It seems like the way to go for toplevel calls and references, though it will take some thinking for it to be reasonable in a VM. But after those things are done, we still need to bridge the gap between Tree-IL and RTL assembly. We will probably have to scrap GLIL, though I can't tell yet. So, that's the status. Apologies for there being no overview yet; I will try to write something about that soon. I reckon we are about a month away from a VM that works well, and has good debugging information, and two or three months away from a merge to master (meaning, we compile all of Scheme). At that point we could look to release the first 2.2 beta release, aiming at a final 2.2 sometime early next year. Regards, Andy -- http://wingolog.org/