@KZhang Where physically in the computer is the PC? Is it in the same place with the RAM?

If so I wonder if I could preset it to the entry point

@quartata I believe it's RAM address 0.

PC is indeed RAM address 0

No I know, but is it really in RAM

yes

OK, so if I emit the RAM along with the ROM I could set its initial value to whatever

Technically yes

I'm sensing a caveat

Actually, the first instruction executed is always instruction 0

oh bummer

I'll have to put a jump in then

the agony of one extra instruction

And then, the next instruction should be whichever the PC is set to

Well in that case I could probably just put a NOP in instruction 0 and preset the PC. Would be shorter than the jump + delay slot

although hmm

no that should be fine, I don't have any run time stack init to do first

@KZhang one more thing: GCC tries to compile nested functions using what's called a trampoline, which is essentially a little bit of code pushed onto the stack at runtime in place of the function address that calculates the proper address to jump too. I don't fully understand why it's necessary but it's not possible currently since we can't execute anythng in RAM

I'll try to do a little bit more research into how it works to see what we can do

but since it is a hardware limitation I thought I'd get your two cents

I'd require quite a bit of work to be able to execute from RAM, but I'll read about the trampoline to see if we can find a workaround

gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Trampolines.html

I don't really get the point tbh but I'm guessing there's some reason why it doesn't know the location of the function

I can probably hook it into doing anything when it would normally emit one though

Can't find much else about them so I'll try to write a C snippet and see what the x86 assembly looks like sometime