Re: [GXemul-devel] gxemul++?

[Anders G. <ga...@gm...>]

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 20:28 +0100, Nils Weller wrote:
> Hello!

Hi Nils,

> gxemul is a wonderful project. However, I heard that it is being rewritten
> in C++ instead of C. I wonder what will be done differently and what major
> new features or approaches to certain problems can we expect from the
> rewrite?

Thanks. Well, the main purpose of rewriting in C++ is for me to get more
used to using C++ in a realistically-sized project (apart from stuff at
work, which is completely unrelated to Emulation). The other main reason
for the rewrite is that GXemul has become too hard to extend, without
breaking older stuff. The dyntrans core, for example, was extremely hard
to maintain. I simply needed a fresh start. (So there are no specific
technical reasons for choosing C++ over C.)

Regarding new features, well, the older version did not really have a
clean concept of what an "emulation setup" was. It was not possible to
save/load full state of an emulation, nor was it possible to fully
describe an emulation using only a configuration file (it was often
necessary to write setup code for individual machines directly in C).
Every new feature or device just felt like yet another hack.

If everything goes as planned, 0.5.0 will have a native GUI. (Optional,
of course.)  And appart from forward-porting the older supported
emulated archs, I'd like to get time to work on M88K, Alpha, SPARC, and
amd64/i386 emulation too.

Hopefully I will also have time to work more on translation to native
code again (remember that 0.4.x only did dynamic translation to IR, not
to native code).

Time will tell what kind of features I will have time to implement.
Don't expect any release soon. :)


Anders