Down the design trail...

[Mike Prince]

On Fri, 9 Dec 1994, Raul Deluth Miller wrote:

> Yeah, we should have C support.  And C++ support.  And C standard
> library support.  And COBOL support.  And Smalltalk.  And SISAL.  And
> ...

We should eventually support all of these compiled down to the LLL.

> At some point, we're going to have to go with a simple design and
> start plugging away at the system design.  It's rather hard to port
> other languages until we have a platform to port them to.  In our
> case, the "platform" we're trying to build is a multi-cpu thing.

I'm already doing this with C (not ++).  I want to demonstrate some of my 
ideas, and maybe even give us the tool to run our LLL.

> Personally, I'm biased towards a forth-machine-like language.
> Basically, minimally simple machine semantics so that the interpreter
> can fly.  Then you build a small library to implement the kernel.  On
> some machines you interpret kernel calls with native code, but to make
> porting faster you don't need to do that.  In my mind, the primitives
> beyond native forth, should allow setting array bounds (that is,
> control memory management hardware) and some kind of communication
> with neighbors (here's a list of neighbor types, each of these is
> itself a list).

The communication will be implicit using agents to call on other 
functions (whether they are local or not).  Each process (agent) is 
limited to accessing the memory block primitives within its scope which 
will provide security.

> Another direction of discussion has been towards describing the
> ultimately portable machine abstraction: 32 bits or 64?  Again, this
> isn't going to buy us alot (in my opinion).  We should focus on a
> single class of machines for our initial portability work.

I'm using (because that's all I have) IMB-PC's as the initial target.  I 
can test the distributed version of our software as I have a LAN of them, 
but alas, I have no Mac's or any other big-endian machines.

Bottom line, I'm all for getting something off the ground, and I'm doing 
it.  I don't mind rewriting everything later, as long as we're making 
progress.

Mike