SquirrelJME/SquirrelJME

# 2015/11/13

***DISCLAIMER***: _These notes are from the defunct k8 project which_
_precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26!_
_The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such_
_all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no_
_longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it._

## 09:59

The wind is still extreme this morning.

## 15:04

Was a busy day with lots of wind. Anyway for LADD on 32-bit systems it is
quite simple, adding two values together in a simple manner. Essentially just
have to add the lower and higher bits and check for overflow. At least
based on reading. I will have to programtically confirm it.

## 17:04

I suppose for long values for 32-bit in POIT I will delagate to a method. For
the potential values which need to be loading into memory, 6 scratch registers
may be needed and basic POIT does not have the means to determine availability.
Should simplify it at the cost of slower long arithmetic.

## 17:10

Doing it this way, the translators extended from the base cannot call methods,
now they can. I suppose this is the cheap way to do it. However when NARF comes
around it should be able to handle dynamic usage of scratch registers along
with other things.

## 17:23

Next instruction type to handle is FCONST_0. I do wonder however if this will
lead to floating point addition still before integer addition. So far the total
class count at this point is 108, just so the kernel can be compiled with all
of its dependencies. Still 108 classes is still much less than other larger
operating system kernels most likely. One alternative is that I can do some
pruning so that unused methods which are never invoked are left out. That would
limit some things however. The kernel itself would provide a very basic subset
of the classes.

## 22:33

PowerPC appears to use the same format that Java uses for floating point values
like most other architectures.

## 22:35

One thing I am not sure about is the PowerPC instruction `lfsx`. Does it
use the raw integer bits from an integer register or does it translate it so
that it is exactly precise. Only one way to find out though.

## 22:40

Actually `lfsx` is from memory so it is the wrong instruction. I would be
pretty hopeful that PowerPC does have a raw int register to float instruction.

## 22:49

And it does not. Which means I am going to need to store the raw float value
in the bit of code and determine the PC address and do a short jump past the
raw constant data. This will require some scratch registers to store the old
link register and to restore it after that small jump.

## 22:55

Fun stuff.

## 23:24

Adding a integer value instruction revealed a bug in my mask calculation code
when the value was negative.

## 23:25

Appears Java 8 lacks FloatSupplier for some reason, although IntSupplier is
available.