"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hey, new guy here.
Welcome. :-)
I'm really interested in the parrot bytecode. What are the files/dirs I
should be looking at to understand everything about packfiles, including
layout, api to deal with it, extracting, writing, JIT compiling, etc.
Well, the bytecode format doc that you have already seen should tell you
everything about the layout, except it's missing at least one thing (info on
the PIC segment). The API is described here:
http://www.parrotcode.org/docs/packfile-c.html
Though IMHO it's a bit of a mess - I was looking at moving packfile stuff
into PMCs, but haven't found the tuits to get anywhere with that.
As for the source tree, packfile.c itself is worth a look for reading in
packfiles and also packout.c for writing them. If you want an example of
using the packfiles API check out perhaps pdump.c or maybe pbc_merge.c; I
wrote the second of these when I was first trying to understand packfile
stuff, so it's reasonably well commented. The JIT subsystem is another
chunk of Parrot and quite seperate from the packfiles stuff.
Hope this helps a little,
Jonathan
