[DotGNU]Portable.NET Status 25 April 2002

[Rhys Weatherley]

Hi all,

I implemented some profiling support in the runtime engine
this week to get a better understanding of which CVM
instructions and library methods are bottlenecks.  Anyone
who wants to play with these profile modes should read
the new "HACKING" file in "engine", and look for the
"Debug modes" section.

While I'm on the subject of "engine/HACKING", I've given
it a bit of an overhaul.  It now describes the CVM engine
architecture in a lot more detail, including the names of
functions and files where you may want to go looking for
interesting things to do.

As described earlier in the week, the pnetlib build system
has been updated so it can build all of the ECMA assemblies
under MS'es C# compiler.  We now have a much better
snapshot as to what still needs to be done.

There were a few minor fixes to the assembler and the
compiler, but no earth-shattering progress on that front
just yet.

I've spent most of this week working on threading primitives
in the "support" directory.  I have some of the basics in
place for threads and mutexes, but still a long way to go
before the engine can be made thread-aware.  I want to
try to get the primitives working and relatively bullet-proof
before I throw them into the engine.

The thread support is currently only turned on for GNU/Linux
and Win32/Cygwin.  I had to use some ugly pthreads hacks
to implement thread suspension, and I'm not sure that they
will work on all versions of pthreads.

I'd appreciate some help with porting the threading code
to other platforms, particularly FreeBSD, NetBSD, and
Solaris.  See the file "support/README.threads" for how
to turn on threading on other systems, and how to test the
thread routines.

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

Cheers,

Rhys.