Monday, June 07, 2010
rx86 conversion complete, 64-bit work started
Last week saw the completion of the rx86 conversion: All tests pass, and the JIT works on i386 machines.
Last week I started on actually implementing 64-bit support. Mostly this will be an exercise in "magic removal": Locating those parts of the code that are only applicable to i386, and either adapting them to work with both i386 and x86_64 or else factoring those differences out into arch-specific classes.
One issue specific to x86_64 is the fact that most instructions cannot encode a 64-bit immediate value. I've worked around this by setting aside one register as a scratch register, and loading the immediate to that register first when a case like this arises. In the future I may try to optimize this to output a 32-bit relative displacement in the cases where that could work.
