3
Liebranca
23d

Rubber ducking your ass in a way, I figure things out as I rant and have to explain my reasoning or lack thereof every other sentence.

So lettuce harvest some more: I did not finish the linker as I initially planned, because I found a dumber way to solve the problem. I'm storing programs as bytecode chunks broken up into segment trees, and this is how we get namespaces, as each segment and value is labeled -- you can very well think of it as a file structure.

Each file proper, that is, every path you pass to the compiler, has it's own segment tree that results from breaking down the code within. We call this a clan, because it's a family of data, structures and procedures. It's a bit stupid not to call it "class", but that would imply each file can have only one class, which is generally good style but still technically not the case, hence the deliberate use of another word.

Anyway, because every clan is already represented as a tree, we can easily have two or more coexist by just parenting them as-is to a common root, enabling the fetching of symbols from one clan to another. We then perform a cannonical walk of the unified tree, push instructions to an assembly queue, and flatten the segmented memory into a single pool onto which we write the assembler's output.

I didn't think this would work, but it does. So how?

The assembly queue uses a highly sophisticated crackhead abstraction of the CVYC clan, or said plainly, clairvoyant code of the "fucked if I thought this would be simple" family. Fundamentally, every element in the queue is -- recursively -- either a fixed value or a function pointer plus arguments. So every instruction takes the form (ins (arg[0],arg[N])) where the instruction and the arguments may themselves be either fixed or indirect fetches that must be solved but in the ~ F U T U R E ~

Thusly, the assembler must be made aware of the fact that it's wearing sunglasses indoors and high on cocaine, so that these pointers -- and the accompanying arguments -- can be solved. However, your hemorroids are great, and sitting may be painful for long, hard times to come, because to even try and do this kind of John Connor solving pinky promises that loop on themselves is slowly reducing my sanity.

But minor time travel paradoxes aside, this allows for all existing symbols to be fetched at the time of assembly no matter where exactly in memory they reside; even if the namespace is mutated, and so the symbol duplicated, we can still modify the original symbol at the time of duplication to re-route fetchers to it's new location. And so the madness begins.

Effectively, our code can see the future, and it is not pleased with your test results. But enough about you being a disappointment to an equally misconstructed institution -- we are vermin of science, now stand still while I smack you with this Bible.

But seriously now, what I'm trying to say is that linking is not required as a separate step as a result of all this unintelligible fuckery; all the information required to access a file is the segment tree itself, so linking is appending trees to a new root, and a tree written to disk is essentially a linkable object file.

Mission accomplished... ? Perhaps.

This very much closes the chapter on *virtual* programs, that is, anything running on the VM. We're still lacking translation to native code, and that's an entirely different topic. Luckily, the language is pretty fucking close to assembler, so the translation may actually not be all that complicated.

But that is a story for another day, kids.
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Comments
  • 1
    @jestdotty A linker is a program that combines binaries. Why do we do that?

    Say you have a big project, lots of source files and dependencies. It doesn't make sense to recompile the entire source plus the dependencies every time you change one or two lines.

    So, each source file is compiled separately into native binary, we generally call the output of this process object files. Linking is putting such files together into an executable or dynamic library, while a static library is simply an archive of objects.

    Linking against a static lib (static linking) is copying code from objects within an archive into the resulting file to make it available. This involves filling out the addresses of values, functions and such. Dynamic linking is a bit weirder. It sets up a binary to perform a similar operation, except at runtime.

    I'm over simplifying but the point this enables us to only recompile modified, individual components whenever changes to the source are made.
  • 1
    @jestdotty One game, which I'm not *actively* developing. Eh, having to write a compiler is getting in the way a little bit ;>

    I don't have a design paper, really. But it's very easy in concept. Turn based, you're a wizard, and everything you can do technically counts as a spell effect. You combine spell effects to make things happen during your turn, and the world around you reacts to the atrocities you've commited.

    I slap GPL on everything, people are free to draw anything they want from my work long as they provide everyone else the same essential freedom.
  • 2
    My ass has never been rubber ducked, and I'm ok with that.
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