VM-beginners February 2012

vm-beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org

5 participants
5 discussions

Beep
by Chris Cunnington 09 Feb '12

09 Feb '12

I thinking the easiest way to connect the Interpreter selectors to the sources code is the IO primitives. These are the easiest to follow. Beep goes from Interpreter>>primitiveBeep to /platforms/iOS/vm/Common/Classes/sqSqueakSoundAPI.m/int ioBeep() The primitives are a point to work out from. At the other end of the spectrum is the JIT. Between the two positions somewhere are byte code interpretation and memory management. Another simple observation is the ratio of Interpreter/ObjectMemory selectors to C/ObjC functions. It's hast to be 10:1. A huge amount of effort goes into managing memory. I just read Glen Krasner's Aug. 1981 Byte article on the vm. It's a misnomer. The article is solely about object format. Onward ... Chris

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Re: [Vm-beginners] Learning Slang
by Marcus Denker 05 Feb '12

05 Feb '12

On Feb 1, 2012, at 3:42 PM, David Corking wrote: > Marcus Denker wrote: > >>> Although Adele Goldberg's book doesn't mention VMMaker or Slang, my >>> limited understanding is that the extensive code presented in Chapters >>> 27 to 30 is written in a 16 bit version of Slang. >>> >> >> No. The Bluebook just uses Smalltalk pseudocode for documentation, it >> was never actually compiled. > > Thanks Marcus for correcting my error. I had misunderstood a comment > about the Blue Book that Dan Ingalls made in an interview a few years > ago. (I got the mistaken impression that the code was drawn from > PARC's actual reference implementation of the Smalltalk-80 VM.) > Yes, so the code base that is now written in SLANG started with the Smalltalk pseude-code of the blue book. But the blue books code was never used for the implementation back then. (the VM was implemented very low level, in parts in the micro code of the processor...) So they took documentation and ran it. cool, not? Now of course SLANG is not nice.... imagine a VM written in Smalltalk that would be runtime changable... Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de

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Learning Slang
by Chris Cunnington 02 Feb '12

02 Feb '12

http://www.adrian-lienhard.ch/blog?article=building-a-pharo-squeak-vm-from-… http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2011-November/009647.html http://16r.ca/JourneyInTheVM.key.pdf I'm not sure learning Slang means much without the greater context. The spine is the build process and the Slang is just at one end of it. Above are two build processes from Adrian Lienhard and DTL. They both use unix platform sources. They use an image EXTERNAL cmake configure script to generate the cmake folders in the build directory. Contrast that with Igor and Esteban (the pdf above), who have image INTERNAL cmake generation classes such as CMakeVMMaker. Those classes fill the build directory with things. DTL uses the VMMaker tool, while Igor does not. He'll put something like this in a Workspace: | config | config := StackInterpreterMacOSConfig new. config internalPlugins: (config internalPlugins copyWith: #TheUniversalAnswer). config generateSourceFiles. CMakeVMGenerator generate: config Of XCode and files like SqueakPureObjcCogVM.xcodeproj it seems the less said, the better. XCode files seem to be left over from a vm builder who is no longer around. (If that's not true, then I'd sure like someone to post one for the iOS folder in the platforms directory!) As a beginner, I prefer to look at Slang as a subset of CMake. And not the other way around. :) Chris

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Re: [Vm-beginners] Learning Slang
by Marcus Denker 01 Feb '12

01 Feb '12

On Feb 1, 2012, at 11:24 AM, David Corking wrote: > Way back on Jan 10th, Sean P. DeNigris wrote: >> What is the best way? Is there a tutorial available somewhere? > > Although Adele Goldberg's book doesn't mention VMMaker or Slang, my > limited understanding is that the extensive code presented in Chapters > 27 to 30 is written in a 16 bit version of Slang. > No. The Bluebook just uses Smalltalk pseudocode for documentation, it was never actually compiled. Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de

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Re: Learning Slang
by David Corking 01 Feb '12

01 Feb '12

Way back on Jan 10th, Sean P. DeNigris wrote: > What is the best way? Is there a tutorial available somewhere? I am sorry that a VM expert did not reply. As a fellow beginner, I don't know the answer to your first question. However, I have the following two documents on my reading list for when I have a need to learn Slang. * Squeak : open personal computing and multimedia, c.2002 (the new blue book) Mark Guzdial; Stephen T Pope; Kim Rose http://www.worldcat.org/title/squeak-open-personal-computing-and-multimedia… http://www.worldcat.org/title/squeak-open-personal-computing-and-multimedia… Chapter on Extending the Squeak Virtual Machine by Andrew C. Greenberg Draft at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/CollectiveNBlueBook/greenberg.pdf * the original Blue Book Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation By Adele Goldberg and David Robson; Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ISBN 0-201-11371-6. http://www.worldcat.org/title/smalltalk-80-the-language-and-its-implementat… Chapters 26 to 30 (pages 538 to 688) in particular pages 569 and 570. Scan at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf Although Adele Goldberg's book doesn't mention VMMaker or Slang, my limited understanding is that the extensive code presented in Chapters 27 to 30 is written in a 16 bit version of Slang. Some of the public method comments in CCodeGenerator and in the "*VMMaker-translation support" category extension methods look as though they would also be helpful to a learner. Would experienced VM devs please correct any of my misunderstandings, or suggest any other learning resources? David

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VM-beginners February 2012