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.
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.
It was useful when we still had the relinker, but now it has no use.
I was waiting a bit to see if the distinction would be useful again,
but it seems like it won't.
I'm not sure why I chose null-terminated initially. Probably because
the z80asm version had null-terminated strings.
Length-prefixes strings are the traditional form of strings in Forth
and it's a bit easier to work with them with traditional forth words
when they're under this form.
I'm planning on going back to 8-bit branching. 16-bit br cells incur
a non-negligible penalty and, while at first 64 words (128 bytes
forward or backward) seemed a bit limiting, I now don't see why one
would ever construct such a big branch. It would be un-forthy.
Also, I looked at using BC instead of IY to hold IP and the transition
would be a lot easier with 8-bit branching.
In this commit, all I do is add overflow checks in IF. The mechanic
below doesn't change. I'll give myself some time to think it over so
that I avoid yet another back and forth.
Virgil Dupras