News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture CPU emulator framework.

Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by monocasa on Thursday October 25, 2018 @01:10PM (#18302476)
It's the core of qemu, refactored out to something that's usable by other clients.

For emulators it's great for getttig started and prototyping, but if you care about perf you end up migrating to a more integrated solution. Sort of like how V8 was originally based on llvm, but wrote their own backend.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by muizelaar on Thursday October 25, 2018 @01:41PM (#18302782)
V8 wasn't originally based on llvm. If anything, it was based on Strongtalk. https://github.com/v8/v8/commit/43d26ecc3563a46f62a022403066...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by monocasa on Thursday October 25, 2018 @01:47PM (#18302852)
Oh, my bad, misremembered.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by munificent on Thursday October 25, 2018 @03:35PM (#18303884)
You may be thinking of Rubinius?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by monocasa on Friday October 26, 2018 @02:15AM (#18307136)
Nah, I was thinking of JavaScriptCore. They replaced their last tier JIT a few years back; it used to be LLVM, but now it's a custom backend "B3".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by 0x8BADF00D on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:21PM (#18304690)
How can you improve perf if you have a guest OS/program running on SPARC and your host is x86? Maybe I’m not understanding it correctly, but don’t you have to translate all the registers and instructions from SPARC to x86? How would you run SPARC code natively on x86?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Unicorn: lightweight, multi-platform, multi-architecture ... by monocasa on Thursday October 25, 2018 @07:06PM (#18305399)
V8 the JavaScript runtime, not SPARC V8. It turns out I was wrong about that part too.
[ Parent | on HN ]