It's a bit more inconvenient in terms of register protection (BC
is much more generally useful than IY), but it makes tight spots
such as next and execute much faster, so I think it's worth it.
The 1 byte limitation has been effective for a while now, but I
hadn't made the move yet, I wanted to see if the limitation would
cause me problems. It doesn't.
Doing this now slightly facilitates the IY->BC move in z80.
Bootstrapping: if you try to recreate the CVM binary from the
previous commit with this code, you'll have bootstrapping problems.
The first bootstrap will compile a binary with 2-bytes wide cells
but branching conditionals that yields 1-byte cells. That's bad.
I got around the issue by temporarily inserting a "397 399 LOADR"
instruction in cvm/xcomp.fs, right before the xcomp overrides. This
way, I force 1-byte cells everywhere on the first compiliation,
which then allows me to apply the logic change in cvm/vm.c and have
a properly running binary.
There is now no more actual code in stable ABI, only references.
This makes refactoring of this code much easier. For example,
changing IY to BC as the IP register.
Only its jump at 0x33 remains.
I've also fixed a strange offset oddity in 8086's (n) placement.
It was off by 2, but strangely, it ran properly. Anyway, now it's
fixed.
Previously, it was impossible to cross-compile Collapse OS from a
binary-offsetted Collapse OS because stable ABI wordrefs would have
a wrongly offsetted address.
This solves the problem by replacing those wordrefs by direct,
hardcoded stable ABI offset references.
Driver configuration don't need their own words at runtime, we only
need to compile them as literals when compiling words.
Now that we have this "declaration blocks" pattern emerging, it
seems like a good idea to take advantage of this in drivers, both
for simplifying the xcomp unit and to make final binary slimmer.
Initially, I used the same letters as those used in the z80 ref
docs, but it makes the different assemblers harder to use than they
should. Having consistent "argtype" rules across assemblers should
help.
Previously, recipes that began spitting binary contents before
loading block 282 would end up with VARIABLE code in their binary,
thus breaking them. We fix this by making this loading process
2-part.
Shadowing core "I" is too messy. As soon as ed is loaded in memory,
nothing else that isn't "i-aware" can be loaded anymore.
I guess that's why "contexts" exist in Starting Forth, but adding
this concept just for allowing the shadowing of core words seems
overkill to me. Renaming I to i in ed seems better.