[NTLK] einstein sept 2012 ... needs symbols.txt

Matthias Melcher mm at matthiasm.com
Fri Sep 7 17:14:27 EDT 2012


On 07.09.2012, at 16:31, howhardz at vcn.bc.ca wrote:

> Friday outlook:
>  Thanx Matthias for quick action ... on the MB air
> new binary will fail at launch on a "segmentation error"; that
> is with a dummy symbols.txt file in there.
> 
>  Other configurations such as Lion might be showing
> better success at launch.

Have you tried 2012.9a? With the "a" at the end? 

The more feedback I can get here, the better, because I have no older machine for testing.

> POSTSCRIPT --> can you provide a web site vector that outlines
> what Fiber is intended to do, if not for Einstein then
> as a design principle

If you like to read in-depth information, search for "cooperative multitasking", "Fiber", "context switching", or "coroutines". It's all the same and typically used in emulators.

So how does this work for Einstein. 

NewtoOS uses memory management and exceptions to execute code all over the place. The JIT system however is pretty much sequential. Fibres allow us to mix JIT and native code while keeping the very complex exception handling intact. Native sequences run in an entirely different context than JIT instructions.

The limitation is, that native code can not call the JIT, but that is not too bad. We can now do a bottom-up rewrite of the NewtonOS, making the emulator faster with every new function. Pure execution speed should go up 50 to 100 times. 

Assuming someone has e few hundred thousand monkeys in his basement, we could translate the ROM, running the OS about a hundred times faster than now, making every current PDA and smartphone a potential host.

 - Matthias


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