World: r3wp

Do you do basic block analysis of the source opcodes to determine 
where the subroutine boundaries are? For that matter, does the Z80 
have indirect branches?

;-_-

Sorry, I don't speak IRC.

yes indirect branches exist

but it's not a problem, the management of branches is done in real 
time, it's in a stack, so i can manage fixed as indirect branches.

How common are they? Can you analyze them to determine their destinations 
to convert them into branches or calls?

all branches are converted into call

difficult to explain with my bad english

Call of function or continuation? (Sorry if your English doesn't 
include computer-science terms)

Meaning, does the call return?

when i seek a Z80 branch opcode (direct or indirect), i stop the 
current rebcode function construction and i build new one for the 
folowing opcodes

so each rebcode function (routines) must return the adress of the 
next branch

Continuation then.

How do you handle back-branches then?

if a routine return an unknwon adress, then the parser jump a these 
adress and rebuild a new function.

back-branches are treated in the same manner

So, no basic block analysis at all. All branches are considered non-local.

yep

Would it be too difficult to translate branches to literal offsets 
into their rebcode equivalents, as an optimization?

here you can see my first try without rebcode http://perso.orange.fr/rebol/galaga.r

i could try this as a final compilation step, perhaps

in the source you can see the concept of branches management i use

Your trick of generating words for branch targets may need changing 
when you switch to rebcode. Pre-2.7 versions of REBOL had hard limits 
on the number of words possible at once (about 8000). You might consider 
issue! values instead with a lookup table (probably a hash!).

ok

It will be a little slower. You might then return references to the 
code rather than the names.

That will cut down on lookups. Make it threaded.

i think i will implement  a cached routines cleaner (GC) ,  to keep 
in memory only routines which are frequently requested

There are some optimizations you can make to the code too, such as 
changing code like this:
    set [v1 v2] reduce [_d _e]
to this:
    v1: _d
    v2: _e

i know but i have some constraint do to my parser

anyway, with rebcode i changed my way

*due to

No block set.

i know

currently a rebuild the parser to generate rebcode instead of rebol 
instructions

*currently i

so i don' t use set block anymore ;-)

It occurs to me that you might be able to do the fixups using a compile-time 
lookup table, or perhaps translating addresses to label statements.

i agree

i add this to my to-do list

It also occurs to me that you could assemble your own code and modify 
the code blocks at runtime to make lookups unnecessary.

but there's some difficulties toing that in real time

As long as you don't change the length of the code blocks any offsets 
would still be valid and the location in memory of the data underlying 
the code blocks wouldn't change, lowering the chance of a crash.

*doing that

if i concatenate code  at the end only (append) the previous branch 
offsets should not  be disturbed ?

How much memory does this machine you are emulating have?

64 Ko

Z80 can only manage 64 Ko of ram at once

but there is a sort of memory mapper

How much address arithmetic is common when doing indirect branches 
and calls, and can you reverse it using flow analysis?

hum i don't understand