An implementation of Parrot's M0 specification[1]
[1] https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/m0/docs/pdds/draft/pdd32_m0.pod


Changes to the spec will be properly documented once the design is more
stable. Some preliminary pointers:

  - use an m0b header without padding and add a field for the file size

  - add offsets for metadata and bytecode segments to directory entries;
    this means the chunk can be constructed immediately when reading
    the entry without having to parse the rest of the file

  - add an encoding field to directory entries so we have the same format
    as m0 strings and can use the mmap'd data directly

  - int and num register sizes are configurable, but ops are always 32-bit,
    which avoids unreasonable comlexity


Some things which haven't been implemented yet, but should be kept in mind:

  - alignment has to be taken into account when writing entries into the
    constants table: unaligned access carries a performance penalty on
    most architectures (if it's even possible at all); eg x86 provides
    atomic access to doubles only if they are 8-byte aligned

  - typed registers are a necessity for efficient JIT compilation;
    each callframe allocation should therefore be accompanied by metadata
    which lists the register types (which can also be used by the gc, which
    needs to detect PMC registers); the fixed type mapping by register
    number isn't flexible enough and doesn't play well with variably-sized
    callframes; the interpreter however will allocate registers of uniform
    size to avoid complexity and at the cost of a bit of wasted space in
    case of register types with different sizes

  - data structures will be dense (no linked lists to avoid chasing pointers
    though memory) and probably power-of-two sized, which hopefully results
    in a reasonable allocation strategy for many access patterns and again
    at the cost of some space; this also means that there's no need to keep
    track of both load and size (resize when the load hits a power of two)


Build instruction:

  $ make
  $ make test
  $ make exe

Cleanup instructions:

  $ make clean
  $ make realclean


Uses clang by default - to use gcc, change all make invocations to

  $ make CC=gcc CFLAGS=-std=c99

If you want to compile as C++, try

  $ make CC=clang++ CFLAGS=-xc++

The code doesn't compile warning-free with gcc 4.5, which is probably related
to a compiler bug fixed in 4.6 (not verified); it doesn't compile at all with
g++ 4.5.


Compiling with Visual Studio is supported, though you'll still need GNU make
and perl in PATH (both Cygwin and MinGW versions should work). Instead of
calling make directly, use the accompanying batch file, ie

  $ vsmake
  $ vsmake test
  $ vsmake exe