[Nestedvm] How's NestedVM doing in my absence?

[Brian Alliet]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 11:29:01AM -0400, chris butler wrote:
> No big questions here. Though i heard there as going to be a port to the
> .net framework (or was it the LLVM?), how did that work out?  Anyone still
> interested in porting it to something like the LLVM or the Mono/.Net?

I might've mentioned one or the other at some point. A CLR/MSIL port
should be very straightforward. The .NET VM is a superset of the JVM.
There are even an handful of things we could do significantly faster
there (because it has tailcalls, and a few other useful instructions).
The only reason I haven't done it is because I haven't had the need.
I've never worried much about using native code with .NET stuff, as it
has almost always targeted windows only anway.

An LLVM port would be a bit harder, as LLVM isn't stack based, like the
JVM and CLR, so you wouldn't be able to reuse as much of the existing
code. However, this also means you could do a more direct translation
from MIPS to LLVM. Just make each register an LLVM variable. I'm not
sure what the point would be though. LLVM mostly just targets native
code anyway (right? I haven't really kept up with it, maybe it does
other cool stuff now), so it seems like it would just be a really slow
path right back to native code. Maybe you could gain some type safety
guarantees, at the expense of performance.

-Brian