[kaffe] State of the Verifier

[Rob Gonzalez]

Hi all,

Seeing as people would like to see 1.1.1 released, and as Jim is waiting
for (among other things) me to submit the final verifier, I figured I'd
give a quick update as to where I stand before I head out for the weekend
to play frisbee on the beach :)

In short, once I rewrite the class instance creation stuff to be
compatible with the pass 3/pass 4 boundary, I'll post the verifier.  Early
next week.

* Need to Rewrite Class Loading
    I've been frantically debugging the verifier in the last week against
    the regression tests and other programs.  It turns out that I'm going
    to have to rewrite some of the class instance creation code in the
    core vm to allow type checking without class loading to occur.

    I'm still failing 5 regression tests that I shouldn't be.  Once I fix
    the class loading situation, I know at least 3 of those will go away.

* Subroutine Verification
    This was the big feature that has been missing the last year (and the
    major reason I didn't submit the verifier earlier).  The specification
    is incredibly vague, so my verifier is not 100% compatible with either
    BCEL's (the most conservative) or Sun's (one of the most liberal).
    Either way, I've finished coding it up, after a number of false
    starts.

* code-analyze.[ch]
    code-analyze does lots of checks that should have been performed in
    the verifier.  Once the verifier is checked in, the next step is going
    to be to remove the checks from this file so that is simply puts
    together information for the JIT compilers.



Cheers,
Rob