[Larceny-users] Larceny on bare silicon

[Jesse Tov]

Hi David,

I think what you want to do is possible (of course), but it would be 
hard, mainly because the Larceny runtime is written in hosted C, not 
freestanding C.  Larceny depends on system and C library services for 
memory allocation and IO.  You could probably hack up an allocator that 
would work directly in 32-bit real mode, but you'd still have a very 
hard time getting IO going.

david rush wrote:
> So I have two questions. One is obvious: does anyone have a good idea
> of where to start before I crawl into a dead-end in the code?

I would start with trying to figure out how to get the services that the 
runtime needs in a freestanding environment.  FreeDOS might provide some 
of what you need to get started.

> And can
> anyone elaborate on how to use the Assassin module as a stand-alone
> assembler?

Given an s-expression representation of ia32 assembly code, the 
assembler returns a byte vector containing ia32 machine code that you 
can jmp or call into.  IAssassin uses the Sassy assembler, which can be 
found with documentation here:

     http://home.earthlink.net/~krautj/sassy/sassy.html

The version of Sassy distributed with Larceny is somewhat modified, but 
this should give you an idea of how it works.  I'm not sure what you 
mean by "stand-alone assembler", but you could write a Scheme program 
that would read Sassy assembly syntax from a file, assemble it, and then 
output it to another file.

Good luck!

Jesse