I have hacked the source to add an indirection table that all object references go through. The indirection contains a pointer and a bank number. "dereferencing" an indirection maps the corresponding bank.
The loading of the initial images goes through, and I can execute 3 bytecode opcodes before it crashes! But this is really a tight fit in the rom, and I quickly ran out of space after adding some debug traces.
There isn't much left that I can comment out. So I guess it's time to start rewriting more things in asm? I can startwith removing puts and putchar but that won't save me the 256 or so bytes I need...
Well... I rewrote bzero and puts and now I have almost 4K free in my rom?!
I think I found why the execution wasn't working (it was, of course, some issue with the memory banks handling). But now the initial image loading is crashing before I can get there :(
#Smalltalk for #AmstradCPC is alive! Well, sort of. The virtual machine is running now, but my choice of memory organization with an indirection page turns out not to be a very good one, as the indirection table quickly fills up because many small objects are created.
Maybe the next step is implementing chars similar to smallints, that is, inlined in other objects. But that will save me only 256 entries in the table, out of 5000.
Add comment