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PDFs and reference material

Someone recently asked for a listing of the redacted reference material and PDFs in this repository, as though I maybe had deep or interesting influences I haven't enumerated elsewhere. I wish! It was just a handful of interesting papers (mostly related to the design of module systems) as well as specs for various systems level stuff needed to write rustboot.

Keep in mind that rustboot started with an AST interpreter, then a stack-machine interpreter, but then I decided I was at risk of being constrained by platform tooling and/or at risk of fooling myself about implementation requirements a native compiler was going to face, so I decided to do a for-real native compiler, and started at the very bottom: byte-at-a-time 32-bit x86 instruction encoding.

The compiler then grew backwards from the instruction emitter, back through a custom object file emitter for ELF and PE (and later Mach-O), and finally an IR, register allocator and lowering pass from the parser. This also included both its own DWARF emitter and parser which it used to serialize and deserialize all crate-level metadata, as well as resolve any runtime dynamic linking between crates. So I actually spent a lot of the early days just groveling around in the internals of low level formats, and needed all the documentaiton I could get.

Here is a list from the last directory I have kicking around:

  • The Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developers Manual

  • Apple Developer Connection's Mac OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference.

  • The Objective Caml system release 3.10 Documentation and user's manual.

  • IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition a.k.a. the Single Unix Standard v3.

  • Program Fragments, Linking and Modularization. Luca Cardelli, DEC SRC Research Report 144, 1997.

  • A Framework for Reducing the Cost of Instrumented Code. Matthew Arnold and Barbara G. Ryder, both of Rutgers University but working at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, PLDI 2001.

  • Mixin' Up the ML Module System. Derek Dreyer and Andreas Rossberg, MPI-SWS, preprint, 2008.

  • How To Write Shared Libraries. Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat, Inc. 2006.

  • DWARF Debugging Information Format Specification versions 2 (Tool Interface Standards Committee, 1995) and 3 (Free Standards Group, 2005).

  • Efficient and Flexible Value Sampling. Burrows et al. Compaq SRC Research Report 166, 2000.

  • Executable and Linking Format (ELF) Specification version 1.2. Tool Interface Standards Committee, 1995.

  • Programming Languages for Reusable Software Components. Matthew Flatt, PhD Thesis, Rice University, 1999.

  • Programming Languages -- C. ISO WG14/N843 Committee Draft, 1998.

  • Mac OS X Mach-O File Format Reference. Apple, 2007.

  • Mach-O Programming Topics. Apple, 2006.

  • Relocatable Object Module Format (OMF) Specification version 1.1. Tool Interface Standards Committee, 1995.

  • Portable Executable Formats (PE). Tool Interface Standards. Undated.

  • Visual Studio, Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification, version 8.0. Microsoft, 2006.

  • A Primitive Calculus for Module Systems. Davide Ancona and Elena Zucca. University of Genoa, 2006.

  • Microsoft Symbol and Type Information. Tool Interface Standards. Undated.

  • From Structures and Functors to Modules and Units. Scott Owens and Matthew Flatt. University of Utah, 2006.

  • Value Profiling. Brad Calder, Peter Feller (UCSD) and Alan Eustace (DEC WRL). IEEE Micro-30, 1997.

  • Formats Specification for Windows, version 1.0. Tool Interface Standards Committee, 1993.

  • Alef Language Reference Manual. Phil Winterbottom. AT&T, 1995.