[pypy-dev] Anyone interested in a MIPS port...

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Vishal,

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Vishal <vsapre80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> a) Does it make sense to have a MIPS port of the PyPy JIT.

Yes, it definitely makes sense.  I assume that the MIPS machines you
consider as final targets have *some* amount of RAM, like, say,
minimum 32MB or 64MB.  PyPy would have issues running on smaller
machines, let alone with the JIT.

> b) How much hardware dependent is a JIT port?

You need to write pypy/jit/backend/mips/, similar to the other
existing JIT backends: x86 (the only one nightly tested), ARM or
PowerPC.  This is the only hardware-dependent part (not e.g. the JIT
front-end): it receives a list of operations (generic operations
represented as nice objects, like "integer addition" and "read this
field from that pointer") and must turn it into machine code.

Sven and David are currently working on the PowerPC backend in the
branch "ppc-jit-backend", if you want to follow; it is still at an
early stage, which means that the amount of code so far should be
reasonable.

Sorry to answer this late, it seems that nobody is very much
interested in contributing...  All I can promise myself is to give you
some help, as I do right now with Sven. :-)


A bientôt,

Armin.