World: r3wp

it has soooo many variations and its been thouroughly tested and 
analysed by thousands of people.

good sauce

Bookmark: "Calling conventions for different C++ compilers and operating 
systems" 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/51814542/36/Relocation-of-executable-code

Right link should be rather: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51814542/calling-convention

And straight from the source (I think we already had this here in 
the past):
http://www.agner.org/optimize/calling_conventions.pdf

You're right, and it looks like I missed it last time. Thanks for 
giving the right source link.

Got a very simple Red/System program running on OS X: 
    Red/System [ ] quit 42
;-)

It took me a few hours to write the file emitter but a full day of 
debugging to make it work. It seems that the issue was related to 
stricter stack alignment requirement on OS X (16 bytes alignment) 
and a different ABI for syscalls. 


It currently works thanks to a few hacks, but I need to extend the 
IA-32 emitter to implement these new requirements in order to make 
it output correct code for OS X.

Rebolek: I think that your first implementation should work once 
I upgrade the compiler.

For those curious about Mac OS X low-level ABI for function calls: 
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/LowLevelABI/130-IA-32_Function_Calling_Conventions/IA32.html

Doc, great news for those of us who primarily develop on OS X these 
days.

Not only those. I appreciate the ability to target OS X without having 
to run it or know anything about it :-)

16 Bytes stack alignment is also preferred/required for MMX/SSE

It seems GCC always uses it

http://www.cs.uaf.edu/2010/fall/cs301/lecture/10_27_sse.html

It also seems it's only required for system calls on OS X

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/612443/why-does-the-mac-abi-require-16-byte-stack-alignment-for-x86-32

happy to know that Mac version is in progress.

Actually, the link I gave to Apple's docs does not cover syscalls...I 
couldn't find any official Apple doc about that. MacOS X seems to 
conform to BSD syscalls calling convention.

I use #pragma pack(4) to control alignment. Read about it here:


http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/64bitPorting/MakingCode64-BitClean/MakingCode64-BitClean.html

GCC 4.5+ uses/requires 16 byte stack alignment per default.

Hello.reds running on MacOS X: http://static.red-lang.org/MacOSX-hello.png

cool :)

Doc, another stupid question: Are there going to be certain platform 
specific parts of code in a Red/System program?

Only OS bindings.

But those defined in current Red/System runtime have an abstraction 
layer, so the runtime API is the same for users on all platforms.

I try to make sure that Red/System code can work the same on all 
platfoms (at least for 32/64-bit ones).

First MacOS X support version released: https://github.com/dockimbel/Red/commit/8b34c8684e273dd31b6778fc654f5e5548db6f37

There are still several things to fix in the runtime.

And I need to change the OS default selection code in the compiler, 
so that the `-t Darwin` option won't be required when running on 
OS X. That fix will also enable the unit tests to work properly.

Just reading %rsc.r, it seems Andreas already added such feature...there's 
probably a bug in compiler.r preventing it from working properly...

Ok, issue fixed, the `-t` option is no more required on MacOS X for 
native compilation.

Wonderful !!!

The unit tests run in approximately two-thirds of the time under 
OS X than they do under Windows/XP running under VirtualBox.

VirtualBox can make systems very slow

Kaj: what is the status of the issue #129 that you have opened? Does 
it still crash?

It's all in there. It doesn't crash with the added solution - which 
should become native

New editor in REBOL for Red/System : edit | compile | run for Windows, 
Linux, MacOSX !
http://www.red-chronicle.com/2011/07/new-red-editor-in-rebol.html

Make a docs directory in the rebol installation folder and type in 
REBOL console :
do http://perso.numericable.fr/frajouen/Red/editor.r

Very nice :-)

Very nice indeed. In GET-KEY, should 'cc be local?

About calling functions in shared libraries and calling conventions, 
there seem to be differences between CPUs and compilers across operating 
systems. There's a lib, called libffi, to help with this, and it 
has bee widely ported.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libffi


Why isn't a lib like libffi used in Red? Is it because of overhead, 
making it slower? Or maybe using such a lib makes little sense the 
way Red is implemented?


When looking at the host-kit for R3, I see functions to open, close 
and find functions in DLLs, but I don't see the calling of those 
functions. Shouldn't that be part of the host kit?

I don't see the calling of those functions
 - the C compiler handles that.

As I understand it, it's about fetching and calling functions at 
runtime, not compile time, so is that really the case?

Red/System relies on shared libraries dynamic linking at load time. 
CPU and ABI specific calling conventions are handled by respectively 
Red's target emitters and file emitters. I don't see how libffi could 
make it simpler or better. From what I understand from FFI (very 
short) descriptions, it is more suitable for high-level languages 
that can't or don't want to deal with low-level interfaces.

Ok, it's probably because I don't understand Red completely. At "load 
time", is that when the system starts up? (Maybe comparable to compile 
time.)


FFI is, as I understand it, a way for high-level languages like Python, 
Ruby, Rebol, etc., to load a library at runtime and call its functions. 
Like we do in R2 with load/library and then some make routine! and 
finally call the functions.

(Actually FFI just handle the calling conventions, you have to load 
the libraries yourself with e.g. dlopen, dlsym, dlclose (POSIX) or 
LoadLibrary, GetProcAddress, FreeLibrary (Win32).)

Load time = Red executable load time. The OS does the job of binding 
the required shared library and making their functions available 
to Red/System programs.

So, when Red is running, you don't have functions to load another 
library and use its functions?

Not for now. In most use cases, binding at load time is enough.