oslib-team

[Tony van der Hoff]

On 29 Oct 2001, in message <200110292036.UAA28402 at inputplus.demon.co.uk>,
you wrote:

> 
> Hi Tony,
> 
> > I recently recieved your request to join the oslib-team mailing list.
> > Of course that will be no problem, but could you let me know your
> > specific interest in joining this list, and in particular how you
> > intend contributing to the OSLib development effort?
> 
> My interest is only recent and due to Matthew Bloch's riscose.
> 
>     http://riscose.sf.net/
> 
> Matthew recently added me to the CVS committers and I was looking for
> ways to improve the source structure.
> 
> As you can imagine, riscose is an ARM instruction emulator with every
> SWI going through a dispatch to the relevant `module', and then the
> function for the specific SWI, and then possibly a further function
> based on reason code, e.g. OS_Heap 3.
> 
> So far, not many SWIs are supported and it has all been hand-written.
> It occurred to me that OSLib is going from C to a SWI whereas riscose
> is doing the opposite.  That means that the C headers could be used by
> riscose for all constants and data definitions.  Also, we could move to
> using the same function prototypes.
> 
> There are some issues with doing this.  OSLib assumes AIUI that RISC OS
> is the compilation environment where as riscose may be compiled where
> an a char isn't unsigned by default, etc.
> 
> It would also be nice to generate the `dispatch' code automatically
> from the OSLib definitions, along with debug statements that can trace
> every SWI's input and outputs.  Discussion with Matthew has only just
> started on this and he's keen too.  The main issue is whether to take
> the *.h files and scan them to generate our specific requirements, or
> to use the yacc grammer to add another `backend'.  Given I'm at home
> with yacc I prefer the latter.
> 
> Anyway, once all this cropped up (a couple of days ago) I thought I'd
> start lurking on all the OSLib lists to learn more about it.
> 
> Hope that gives you some background, and if you've any particular
> comments about how OSLib can be of use we'd like to hear them.
> 

An interesting project, and a novel approach. I'm not sure that lurking on
the OSLib-team list is going to help you a great deal, it is a low volume
list primarily discussing patches and further development, but you are
subscribed as of now. Of course you are welcome to ask for help from any of
us on the inner workings of DefMod and OSLib.

I agree that you'd be better parsing the SWI definitions, rather than the
headers; the former will have more information.

As for development environment, DefMod has been recently ported to Unix, and
it can now compile and run under Unix as well as RISC OS. This will feature
in the next release, which I am currently preparing. I don't think that the
signedness of char is an issue anywhere.

Anyway, good luck; keep us informed of your progress.

Cheers, Tony
-- 
Tony van der Hoff         | MailTo:tony at mk-net.demon.co.uk
                          | MailTo:avanderhoff at iee.org
Buckinghamshire, England  | http:www.mk-net.demon.co.uk