[B2-devel] Plan for 0.9 release ?

[<gb...@di...>]

Hi,

I thought B2 0.9 was to be released a few weeks ago. What needs to be
done before such an event happens ? Was I supposed to fix some things=A0?
Please refresh my mind.

I uploaded improved code for SIGSEGV handling into mainline. At that
time, I hadn't checked if B2 was branched or tagged, so I hope that I
didn't break too many things.

When could the following be inserted:
- MacOS X support
- runtime depth switching
- Improved FPU emulation

The latter is partially implemented in B2/JIT. It should now be possible
to port its FPE (sort-of IEEE-based) code to non-x86 platforms provided
that the target processor supports extended floating-point precision
(96/128-bit, IEEE 854?). I established this condition because that was
the only means I found to have working scrollbars in MacOS 8. Probably
scrollbars were not working properly in double-precision because of some
other bug ?

That brings the issue of target processors that can't do more than
double-precision (8 bytes, e.g. PPC). Providing an emulation of
extended-precision FP would require too much work that probably doesn't
worth the effort (speed-wise, usability). Any thoughts ?

At some point, I wanted to port the JIT compiler to PPC but Apple's one
is probably a better choice if we don't JIT compile FPU instructions.
Another problem arises then: is it possible to port powerrom_cpu to
Linux/ppc ?

Besides, I would like to play with Reversed Address Space again now that
direct addressing works fairly well and byte-swapping is probably now
the issue on little endian systems.

Bye,
Gwenol=E9.