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Postings from September 2001
Simon Cozens <simon@netthink.co.uk> wrote:
> Firstly, a magic number is presented to identify the bytecode file as
> Parrot code.
Hopefully this is followed by a header that has a version number and
lots of useful stuff like flags and offsets and things, just like wot
real object files have :-)
> Next comes the fixup segment, which contains pointers to
> global variable storage and other memory locations required by the main
> opcode segment. On disk, the actual pointers will be zeroed out, and
> the bytecode loader will replace them by the memory addresses allocated
> by the running instance of the interpreter.
Er, are we really having a section of the file full of zeros? Surely
we just need a "BSS size" field in the header that tells the loader how
many bytes to mmap("/dev/zero")?
> Similarly, the next segment defines all string and PMC constants used in
> the code. The loader will reconstruct these constants, fixing references
> to the constants in the opcode segment with the addresses of the newly
> reconstructed data.
Will the constants in the file be stored as serialised PMCs or as raw values?
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