SquirrelJME/SquirrelJME

# 2016/01/29

***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._

## 07:07

Snowed some more. The new hairball boot code looks much cleaner for the most
part and is far simpler also.

## 09:17

Seems even with my newer and still even lighter hairball bootstrap code, I
still get the issue of the class stuff.

## 11:36

Porting it to Windows was not too troubling. However I suppose the last thing
that I must do is just cheat. That is, just load all of the classes in hairball
(or at least reference them) and keep them in memory during the compilation
process.

## 11:49

I will also have to include all of the dependencies of hairball also because it
cannot find the JSON library either.

## 16:47

I believe I know why it occurs AFTER the compiler is called. The compiler might
be looking at the system class loader to provide classes for the compiler.

## 17:04

Actually, the JavaCompiler provided by Oracle just uses tons and tons of
classes.

## 17:01

I could just use Hairball's class loader as the system class loader which may
work to do what I want to do. However, HairballClassLoader cannot use resource
bundles becuase there is a recursive invocation involved.

## 17:12

However, that still causes the issue.

## 17:20

I suppose as an alternative which probably might not work is to make a special
class loader which loads system based classes itself and potentially delegates
them. Basically when a class is requested, it just getResourceAsStream(class)
and then just loads the class data even if it would be derived from the main
class loader. I could then also just hide the parent. There might be issues,
well maybe not, when it comes to finding dependencies for classes. I could
always just try it out and see how it works. Then if a class is not found in
the system class loader it just then delegates to a default package list with
one for hairball.

## 18:27

And it appears my `SystemClassLoader` fixes said issues so to speak.

## 18:42

So although my kludge is really really ugly, it may only be needed for
bootstrapping hairball on Java 8. I will have to see if I can avoid this
issue in bootstrap environments for older virtual machines so it can still
build it.

## 18:44

I just have to make sure my kludge also works on Windows/Wine. I shall see
about that however. I really hope it does work without issue. There is
definitely a drop in speed slightly due to the way I programmed the kludge so
that it would work reliably. Sadly this is pretty much the first time I had to
do something such as this in Java. And it appears that it works in Wine also.

## 18:46

So now I can continue what I was doing, it has quite literally been a week
since I last touched the code I was working on due to this Hairball refactor.
I currently also do not have the meta code generation implemented but so far
nothing uses it. The PowerPC code I have written no longer uses it. I just now
have to go back to rewriting the assembler/disassembler to be much cleaner than
how it was before. I still know my notes for it however.

## 18:48

I do wonder if stuff such as Squirrel Quarrel still runs. I shall check this
out also and provide any fixes if that is needed.

## 19:23

Appears services are not being added to the bootstrap JARs it seems.

## 19:47

Might be just `findResources()` not removing the leading slash, since
everything I use for the most part is absolutely references rather than just
local. This may fix it.

## 21:55

Believe I need to perform my planned speed increase of `PackageContents` by
making it use soft references for entries and general management of the map
interface rather than just always iterating over every single entry every
single time.