* The MonoNet runtime
The MonoNet runtime will implement the JIT engine (and a byte
code interpreter for quickly porting to new systems), the
class loader, the garbage collector, threading system and
metadata access libraries.
Currently the runtime contains the beginning of an image
loader and metadata access entry points. Since Beta2 has been
now released, it is possible to resume work using the ECMA
specs and testing with Beta2-generated executables.
The runtime core will be implemented in C, in a library
"libMonoVES.so".
** Executing MSIL/CIL images
The code will load an executable and map the references to
external assemblies to our own version of the assemblies on
GNU/Linux.
Our roadmap looks like this:
* Milestone 1: Fully read and parse all CIL byte-codes
and metadata tokens (ie, a disassembler).
* Milestone 2: Complete an interpreter for CIL byte
codes. This interpreter can be used temporarly to
run CIL byte code on a system where no JIT is
available.
* Milestone 3: IA32 translating-JIT engine.
* Milestone 4: non-Intel port of the JIT engine.
* Milestone 5: Optimizing JIT engine port for IA32.
* Milestone 6: non-Intel port of the Optimizing JIT
engine.
A setup similar to the Kaffe JIT engine can be used to
layout the code to support non-IA32 architectures. Our work
will be focused on getting a IA32 version running first.
The JIT engine should work on Linux and Win32, although you
might need to install the CygWin32 development tools to get a
Unix-like compilation environment.
** Garbage Collection
We have decided to implement a generational tracing garbage
collector, which is very similar to the one being used by
.NET. For an introduction to the garbage collection system
used by Microsoft's CLR implementation, you can read this book
on Garbage
Collection.
Although using a conservative garbage collector like Bohem's
would work, all the type information is available at runtime,
so we can actually implement a better collector than a
conservative collector.
** PInvoke
PInvoke will be supported, and will be used to wrap Unix API
calls, these in turn are required for reusing some of the
GNOME libraries that will reduce the work we have to do to
deliver a complete class library.