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1439 :: Does Nim support self-modifying code?

• frool (orginal) [2015-07-10T16:34:38+02:00] view original

  Does Nim support self-modifying code? More specifically, I need the ability to compile code (e.g. a routine) at runtime and inject it into the running program, on the fly. The ability to remove code from memory, when it is no longer needed, would also be important. Thanks

  ---frool

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• Varriount (orginal) [2015-07-10T16:52:11+02:00] view original

  Why do you need this feature? It's possible to implement, but quite hard - You either need to run the code in a vm, or somehow compile it.

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• Araq (orginal) [2015-07-10T17:21:17+02:00] view original

  Or you use DLLs. ;-)

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• Stefan_Salewski (orginal) [2015-07-10T18:16:26+02:00] view original

  Note, that question is closely related to my question about plugin support:

  http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/1400

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• FedeOmoto1 (orginal) [2015-07-13T21:42:44+02:00] view original

  You can use the LLVM module. There's a factorial example you can take a look at.

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• runvnc (orginal) [2015-07-15T21:59:15+02:00] view original

  Here's a couple of crazy possible insecure ideas obviously without a lot of knowledge of nim internals:

  • Maybe there is a way to use Nim internals to generate C code without writing to disk, then feed that to a bundled tiny c compiler, then run it like this http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/hello-jit-world-joy-of-simple-jits.html?m=1
  • or once you can generate the C code to memory, use something like cling https://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling

  More crazy unrelated ideas:

  • use the new Nim JIT as the basis for a p2p VR browser with built in streaming/push DHT/named data networking/ethereum/ipfs/swarm/ndn type thing plus markdown support/possibly html support (or external html rendering)/bitcoin
  • ok, that was pretty random

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• Demos (orginal) [2015-07-16T23:14:11+02:00] view original

  why not package the nim compiler and a C compiler (maybe TCC) with your program and then generate a dll that you can load on demand. It would be nice to be able to use the compiler as a library but that's not really supported at the moment. You can always shell out though.

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