[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]
Posted to:
comp.lang.pop, comp.unix.solaris, comp.sys.sun.hardware,
comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.prolog
I wonder if anyone has tried or plans to try or would like
to try to convert Poplog on Solaris to a 64-bit system?
All the sources are available at the Free Poplog site
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html
The current version of solaris poplog runs in 32-bit mode:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/solaris1553.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/new/solaris1553.tar.gz
However there is a version that works in 64-bit mode on Alpha CPU
with Digital unix (or whatever it is now called).
Most of the system sources are the same, in these two directory
trees.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/S.sun4r5/
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/S.axposf/
There are some programs which can be made to go significantly faster
by using 64bit integers as bit strings on the Alpha, and I assume the
same benefit would be available on Sparc.
If anyone tries the conversion I would be interested to know how they
get on. The guides to porting and rebuilding the system in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc/
may be useful.
I don't know how much work it will be. At one extreme it may simply be
a matter of recompiling existing sources using flags to specify 64 bits.
At another extreme it may involve a lot of work changing the run-time
incremental compiler to produce different machine instructions and also
changing the assembler files $popsrc/*.s
Will the same X libraries work?
Of course the change will significantly increase the size of many
data-structures, e.g. lists and full vectors.
Aaron
===
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk (········@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html