Re: EDE - Personal Suggestions and Ideas

Andrey Romanenko
2004-05-28T11:23:50Z

David Given wrote:

>But if you're not programming in C, you don't have this limitation. Unix
>traditionally is programmed in C, so people don't think about this much, but
>it would be really nice if the kernel would manage all the segment registers
>and not just CS and DS. So that, if you like, you could load a binary that
>allocated all four segments. This would allow nice features such as a Basic
>interpreter that stored its byte-code in ES, its working stack in SS, and
>used DS for workspace.
>
>
You propose to maintain two or more pointers that points to same memory
location but to different areas that may cross over.
That means that if you have (pointer == pointer2) it is not enough to
say that they are poining to the same object.
I think this situation is COMPLETE NIGHTMARE that gives us no value but
only troubles.
Yes I understand that 8086 architecture alredy support it but this is
not a reason to bring this to C compiler.
I belive C programmer does not need to know about all this 8086's
xxxx:xxxx memory structure at all.
It is job of compiler to convert 32bit pointers to xxxx:xxxx addresses.
So ideally there would be two types of executables: old
(that we have now) and new with multi segments where compiler using
kernel manages all segments allocation and converts
32bit pointers to apropriate locations.

Andrey