* The Mono runtime
- The Mono 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.
+ The Mono runtime implements a JIT engine for the CIL virtual
+ machine (as well as a byte code interpreter, this is to
+ quickly port it to new systems), the class loader, the garbage
+ collector, threading system and metadata access libraries.
- Currently the runtime has an image loader and metadata access
- entry points. The runtime comes with a simple interpreter
- that can execute very simple programs.
+ We currently have two runtimes:
+
+ <ul>
+ * <b>mono:</b> The Just In Time compiler implemented
+ using a BURS instruction selector. We only support
+ x86 machines in the JIT engine at this point.
+
+ * <b>mint:</b> The Mono interpreter. This is an
+ easy-to-port runtime engine.
+ </ul>
+
+ Currently both runtimes are missing garbage collection. We
+ are planning on using the ORP GC engine and deploy it by
+ middle January.
+
+* COM and XPCOM
+
+ We plan on adding support for XPCOM on Unix and COM on Microsoft
+ Windows later in our development process.
** Executing MSIL/CIL images
Linux.
Our roadmap looks like this, this has been updated as of
- <b>Jul 15, 2001</b>:
+ <b>Dec 18, 2001</b>:
<ul>
* Milestone 3: <b>Done</b>Define an <i>lburg</i>-like
instruction selector for the JITer for Intel.
- Although slower at JITing than a streaming JITer, it
- generates better code. The same grammar can later
- be used for the stream jitter.
- * Milestone 4: Implement JITer. This is where our
- current efforts are focused on, the JITer is 60% ready.
+ * Milestone 4: <b>Done</b> Implement JITer. This is where our
+ current efforts are focused on, the JITer currently runs
+ all of the code we have tested on it. The major limitation
+ is that our class libraries are not complete, and hence not
+ every application can be ran.
* Milestone 5: Port of the JITer to non IA32 systems.
</ul>
- A setup similar to the Kaffe JIT engine can be used to
+ A setup similar to the Kaffe JIT engine will 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
will need to install the CygWin32 development tools to get a
- Unix-like compilation environment.
+ Unix-like compilation environment (mostly we use GNU make in
+ a few of the makefiles).
-** JIT Engine (<b>updated, Nov 16th, 2001</b>)
+** JIT Engine (<b>updated, Dec 18th, 2001</b>)
The JIT engine uses a code-generator generator approach for
compilation. Given the properties of CIL byte codes, we can
** 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 <a
- href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471941484/o/qid=992556433/sr=2-1/ref=aps_sr_b_1_1/103-5866388-0492603">Garbage
- Collection.</a>
-
- Another consideration is to use the same interface that ORP
- uses to its Garbage Collection system and reuse that GC system
- instead of rolling our own, as the ORP system is pretty advanced
- and is independent of the rest of ORP.
+ We will be using the Intel ORP GC engine as it provides a precise
+ garbage collector engine, similar to what is available on the
+ .NET environment.
Although using a conservative garbage collector like Bohem's
would work, all the type information is available at runtime,
** IO and threading
The ECMA runtime and the .NET runtime assume an IO model and a
- threading model that is very similar to the Win32 API. Dick
- Porter has been working on the Mono abstraction layer that allows
- our runtime to execute code that depend on this behaviour.
+ threading model that is very similar to the Win32 API.
+
+ Dick Porter has been working on the Mono abstraction layer
+ that allows our runtime to execute code that depend on this
+ behaviour.
** Useful links
PInvoke is the mechanism we are using to wrap Unix API calls
as well as talking to system libraries.
- We hvae implemented PInvoke through libffi, but we are likely
- going to roll our own system as the runtime matures, specially
- as the interpreter is approaching completion, and we move into
- the JITer.
+ Initially we used libffi, but it was fairly slow, so we have
+ reused parts of the JIT work to create efficient PInvoke trampolines.
projects / mono.git / blobdiff