RE: How does GNU Smalltalk build primitive selectors?

[Mark Bratcher]

Thank you, Paolo. I’ll paw through some of that stuff and see what I can figure out.

 

I think there may be an issue with the small integer multiplication in particular. It doesn’t seem to promote results to LargeInteger properly if at all when the product of two SmallInteger types overflows. I don’t know if “auto-promotion” is expected in Smalltalk arithmetic in general, but it does seem that certain other methods, such as conversion of floats to strings, counts on it.

 

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From: Paolo Bonzini
Sent: Saturday, February 20, 2021 4:54 PM
To: Mark Bratcher
Cc: GNU Smalltalk
Subject: Re: How does GNU Smalltalk build primitive selectors?

 

Hi, some primitives are special cased and implemented directly in the byte code interpreter. You can find the implementation in vm.def.

 

The primitives in prims.def will still be used with #perform:, for example "2 perform: #* with: 3" will invoke the VMpr_SmallInteger_times primitive in accord with the source code of the * method of SmallInteger.

 

Paolo

 

Il sab 20 feb 2021, 00:42 Mark Bratcher <mdbratch@gmail.com> ha scritto:

Hello

 

I started chasing down the issue with the display (`printOn`) for floats which led me to a few different issues. One in particular leads to a potential issue with the SmallInteger >> * operator primitive. However, I’m having trouble understanding how this is actually implemented and built, or how GNU Smalltalk in general handles primitives.

 

The SmallInteger >> * selector in kernel/SmallInt.st seems to get bypassed. I found VMpr_SmallInteger_times in libgst/prims.inl, but this doesn’t seem to get called, either (at least not as evidenced by trying to trace execution).

 

So I’m looking for a little guidance on the structure of this part of the code structure.

 

Thank you!

 

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