Metacompilation and Assembly

RETRO 10 and 11 were written in themselves using a metacompiler. I had been fascinated by this idea for a long time and was able to explore it heavily. While I still find it to be a good idea, the way I ended up doing it was problematic.

The biggest issue I faced was that I wanted to do this in one step, where loading the RETRO source would create a new image in place of the old one, switch to the new one, and then load the higher level parts of the language over this. In retrospect, this was a really bad idea.

My earlier design for RETRO was very flexible. I allowed almost everything to be swapped out or extended at any time. This made it extremely easy to customize the language and environment, but made it crucial to keep track of what was in memory and what had been patched so that the metacompiler wouldn't refer to anything in the old image during the relocation and control change. It was far too easy to make a mistake, discover that elements of the new image were broken, and then have to go and revert many changes to try to figure out what went wrong.

This was also complicated by the fact that I built new images as I worked, and, while a new image could be built from the last built one, it wasn't always possible to build a new image from the prior release version. (Actually, it was often worse - I failed to check in every change as I went, so often even the prior commits couldn't rebuild the latest images).

For RETRO 12 I wanted to avoid this problem, so I decided to go back to writing the kernel ("Rx") in assembly. I actually wrote a Machine Forth dialect to generate the initial assembly, before eventually hand tuning the final results to its current state.

I could (and likely will eventually) write the assembler in RETRO, but the current one is in C, and is built as part of the standard toolchain.

My VM actually has two assemblers. The older one is Naje. This was intended to be fairly friendly to work with, and handles many of the details of packing instructions for the user. Here is an example of a small program in it:

:square   dup   mul   ret :main   lit 35   lit &square   call   end

The other assembler is Muri. This is a far more minimalistic assembler, but I've actually grown to prefer it. The above example in Muri would become:

i liju.... r main : square i dumure.. : main i lilica.. d 35 r square i en......

In Muri, each instruction is reduced to two characters, and the bundlings are listed as part of an instruction bundle (lines starting with i). This is less readable if you aren't very familiar with Nga's assembly and packing rules, but allows a very quick, efficient way of writing assembly for those who are.

I eventually rewrote the kernel in the Muri style as it's what I prefer, and since there's not much need to make changes in it.