The (def-struct) stuff is part of the assembler ! Not the Lisp.
Same with (def-enum) etc.
I am going to have to write a document to clearly state where these boundaries between the Lisp, the C-Script and the VP layers. I realise it's not that obvious sometimes.
All objects used by the Lisp are instances of classes from the class library, ie that stuff in class/ folder.
These instances are ref counted objects, as they are derefed and they drop to 0 refs they get deinited and freed.
The Lisp is constructed from these, for example Lists in the Lisp are an instance of the class/vector, numbers are an instance of class/num, the environment is a chain of class/hmap etc.
So yes, you do have GC if you don't make cycles, and you do have to care about not doing that just as you would in C++.
That code is using the C-Script assembler prototyping macros. It will produce VP assembler output, but lets you work without worrying about registers while you're getting stuff going.
Have a read through the docs/ASSIGNMENT.md file to see how this all fits together.
There is currently no GC, by choice, but I recently did some work to assist the Stats app that I added recently that could lead to me implementing a GC at some point in the future.
There is a start on documentation in the docs/ folder. I know it's sparse at present I do aim to add more over time.
The system can build itself from source after clean, on my 2014 Macbook in under 0.4s. It's not exactly a standard benchmark though, but it's not slow considering that's a Lisp (like) interpreter doing all the compiling and assembling !. Footprint at the moment for everything is 158KB.
The snapshot.zip file contains 3 separate snapshots for the 3 ABIs supported currently.
It's not bound to any host OS. I am using SDL to provided a simple abstraction to open a Window and obtain key and mouse input. I use very little of the SDL features, just a rectangle fill and rectangle bit blit. See the gui/ctx/class.inc for all those, everything else in the GUI, like the compositor and vector graphics library, widgets et al are done in VP on the CrysaLisp side.
I have a small abstraction to the host OS via the sys/pii/functions, these just use the jump table you can see in the main.c file. Any host OS should be able to compile the main.c with little or no changes, but eventually there will be a native filesystem available from VP/Lisp.
I will be doing direct bare metal hardware support, and there are things happening on that front but I can't talk about that here.
But during my experimentation stage it was very useful to have it running hosted, and I'll keep the hosted version running going forward as it provides a nice dev environment.
I do have a plan to get a version done that could boot under VMWare etc, but I've only got so much time on my hands and have to spread myself over the whole codebase as best I can. :)
Just a quick comment till I can get home. There are three main layers of in use. The more Lisp like layer in apps/ and cmd/. The lowest level VP assembler and an assembler with stack variables and expression compiler I call C-Script. This is my hobby and a follow up to Taos that I did back in the 90’s. See ‘Virtual Processor’ page on Wikipedia for link articles of various scans from back then. Got to head into the car now.....
Thanks again folks for the interest. You catch me yet again when I’m at work but I’ll try answer question in an hour or so once I get home. Regards to all. Chris
I’m not going to reply to anything on this thread. But this may be interesting.
Chris