Re: AMPC 1.4.3 released (C to Java Class Files compiler suite)

Eric wrote:


> If you don't mind talking a little about the internals, I'm always
> interested in how people get around the pointer dereferencing issue in
> the JVM. The JVM doesn't inherantly support this (it doesn't let you
> load a value given a memory address) and many of the work-arounds are
> klunky.


I don't know about AMPC, but the obvious one to me is that a pointer
variable has an array object reference and offset into the array.
Pointer arithmetic adds or subtracts from the offset, and the offset is
used when the pointer is dereferenced. When pointers are subtracted or
compared with relational operators other than == and !=, only the offset
is subtracted or compared. C makes no guarantee of the results of
subtraction or non-equality comparison of pointers to different objects.


(A pointer variable might also need some type information so that
functions like memcpy() can properly handle copies to/from unsigned char.)


-- glen

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