Is copy-and-patch really a new idea, or just a new name for an old idea?
When I learned programming (and interpreters particularly) around 2010, I thought it was well-known that you could memcpy chunks of executable code that your compiler produced if you were careful ... the major gotcha was that the NX bit was just starting to take off at the time (Even on Linux, most people still assumed 32-bit distros and might be surprised that their CPUs even supported 64-bit. At some point I ended up with a netbook that didn't support 64-bit code at all ...).
Unfortunately I ended up spending too much time on the rest of the code to actually look deeply enough into it to build something useful.
It is an old idea with a new name. For example, QEMU orginally worked like this [1] and they already used relocations to patch in constants, before they later moved to TCG for higher-quality code.
When I learned programming (and interpreters particularly) around 2010, I thought it was well-known that you could memcpy chunks of executable code that your compiler produced if you were careful ... the major gotcha was that the NX bit was just starting to take off at the time (Even on Linux, most people still assumed 32-bit distros and might be surprised that their CPUs even supported 64-bit. At some point I ended up with a netbook that didn't support 64-bit code at all ...).
Unfortunately I ended up spending too much time on the rest of the code to actually look deeply enough into it to build something useful.