OpenEuphoria

Re: vMac

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at EMAIL.MSN.COM> Oct 06, 1998
• 512 views

ck writes:

> If you can't realisitically build an OS using a language such as
> EUPHORIA, what are the ramifications of creating a language
> (EUPHORIA) on top of a language (C), as RDS does with EUPHORIA?

To write an operating system from scratch, you need to do
things with the hardware that can't be expressed in anything
but assembly language. You can't build an operating system
in pure C, i.e. with no escapes to assembly. Although UNIX,
for instance, might be 98% C, there are some things, such
as fiddling with virtual memory registers, that can only be done
with special machine instructions that a compiler would never emit.

You *could* write an operating system that was, say, 90% Euphoria
code, but I don't think you'd want to, because O/S performance is
usually extremely important.

> How limited is EUPHORIA with C as its underlying structure thingie?

I don't see any real limitations from using C.
You could also ask Pete Eberlein or David Cuny.

There are a few places where I insert some hand-coded
assembly into the C code to improve performance
or to do something dirty that can't be expressed in C.

One place where this arises is in exw where a C function
in a .DLL is called. In C, you can't code a call to a routine when you
don't know until run-time how many arguments to pass *or*
what type those arguments are. There's simply no way to express this.
So in exw I have to resort to some machine-level trickery that
fools the compiler into doing what I want.

Regards,
     Rob Craig
     Rapid Deployment Software
     http://members.aol.com/FilesEu/