[DotGNU]Portable.NET status 24 May 2002

[Rhys Weatherley]

The major improvements this week are to performance of
the runtime engine, and portability to MacOSX and NetBSD.

Gopal also kept me on my toes with a bunch of verifier
bugs.  And he began implementing support for "base" in
the C# compiler.  Keep up the good work Gopal.

Pnetlib has been slow lately.  Just a quick reminder that
the C# library is always in need of programmers.  It isn't
necessary to be a guru either: basic Java skills and a
willingness to poke around and learn are all that are
required.

The CVM interpreter core is now three interpreters in one:

1. Basic switch loop ("switch threaded").
2. Token threaded.
3. Direct threaded.

#define's in "engine/cvm_config.h" determine which version
is compiled, depending upon the system's characteristics.

For more information on what the above terms mean, see
the following excellent article:

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threaded-code.html

Moving from token threading to direct threading has the
biggest impact on non-x86 platforms such as ppc and sparc,
but it also speeds up x86.  The catch is that it uses
about 4 times as much memory in the method cache as the
equivalent token threaded code.

No official release this week.  All changes are in CVS.

Cheers,

Rhys.