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What's News in the PlayBasic world ? - Find out here.
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PlayBasic To Dll - Tweaking Looping Constructs
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By: Kevin Picone Added: April 25th, 2014
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Category: All,Update,Tools,Machine Code
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PlayBasic To Dll - Tweaking Looping Constructs
The past day or so I've been wrestling with FOR/NEXT/STEP implementation in the translator of all things. Those reading the PB1.64P upgrade blog lately would no doubt be aware that the compiler/VM side has recently changed, the changes were explicitly made to facilitate an easier more accurate translation to machine code from the byte code origin. When porting the changes across to PB2DLL I noticed that it only supported Integer FOR/NEXT looping structures, where as the VM supports integer and floating point look structures
Floating point loops present a bit of a problem due to the FPU's rather awful implementation, but really that's everything floating point in these things. Writing the translator code isn't difficult, it's just that it needs extra steps when dealing with floats which feels rather awkward. Knowing this, invested some time into the PB compiler to make sure the compiler side cleans out any unnecessary steps when setting up the loop and gives enough information to easily work out how to set the loop and what kind of set up is needed. The decoder is able to pick up short cut situations where you used literals in your For Next Statement and cut down amount of screen code needed, in some cases on screening is need. Since the loops duration can be validated at compile time. It's those little things that help fine tune the performance of the final machine code.
The big question is when do we release ? - Well since both sides need to be in alignment for the resulting DLL's work, the original plan was to release them both together, but I think we might release PB2DLL first.. This will help further test the translation in real world situations. Of course that'll most likely mean that there will be a few updates made prior to the release, but there's not that can be done about it. It now just needs people other than me testing it.
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