Common Smalltalk VM Summit

[Alex Perez]

David Griswold wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> Dan Ingalls and I have been talking, trying to figure out what to do about
> the major opportunity offered by the recent release of the Strongtalk
> virtual machine as open source.

It seems you've come up with an excellent plan of attack, and I'm glad 
to see people really trying to make this happen. I had the thought 
independently less than a week ago, after evaluating a dozen Smalltalk 
VM's for a potential commercial project.

> 
> Rather than keep this discussion to ourselves, our thinking was that this
> would be the perfect time to call a kind of summit, with representatives of
> all the major Smalltalk implementations, both open-source and commercial.
> The topic: what if we could build a shared high-performance open-source
> platform suitable for hosting a number of different Smalltalk systems, one
> that we can all share and work on together?

It sounds like a worthy goal, and I'm surprised nobody else has 
responded to this message. This sounds like a great first step, although 
I had also had the thought that *maybe* it would be possible to get an 
unofficial Smalltalk-2007 specification, which would be a very clear 
unofficial (but community-supported, since all interested parties would 
have a stake and hand in writing the specification) revision to the 
de-facto Smalltalk-80 standard and/or ANSI Smalltalk standard.

> 
> While the details of the type-feedback techniques used in the Strongtalk VM
> are arcane, the benefits are not: *much* higher performance for general
> Smalltalk code.  Dan, myself, and many others who know about type-feedback
> and the pioneering Self system, have been dreaming for many years about the
> possibility that someday this technology might make it into mainstream
> Smalltalk VMs.  It would take Smalltalk performance to a whole new level.

Which I'd love to see. On a somewhat-related but tangential note, has 
anybody done any experimental porting of Exupery to ARM (ARM11, 
specifically) CPUs?

> 
> That someday is here now, if the different factions within the Smalltalk
> community can pull together a little bit so that we don't miss this
> opportunity.

As a developer interested in using Smalltalk in a commercial product, 
this would be greatly beneficial to not only myself, but surely many 
others as well.

> 
> There may be debate within the community about some aspects of the
> Strongtalk project, for example the type system, but we should all be able
> to agree on the simple idea that a whole lot more performance would be a
> Good Thing.  Now a huge performance gift has suddenly shown up on our
> doorstep.
> 
> The last thing Smalltalk needs is another incompatible implementation.  The
> splintering of Smalltalk implementations has dispersed the huge amount of
> talent and effort needed to build, port, maintain, and extend a really good
> virtual-machine.  Alone, this is a problem for each of us.  Together, a
> really good, super-fast type-feedback VM is for the first time within reach.

Agreed! And the BSD license is quite permissive and flexible, to boot.
> 
> I would like to invite the smart people out there who know and care most
> about the various Smalltalk virtual machines, to join Dan and I in a fairly
> focused discussion about this starting tomorrow (Thursday, PST) on the
> Strongtalk discussion group, at
> http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general.  I will be out of the
> country for 6 weeks starting Wed the 11th, so I would like to propose that
> we try to go back and forth about this a few times by the end of Friday, so
> we can think about this over the weekend, and maybe come up with a proposed
> general course of action by the middle of next week, so we all have
> something to think about until my return.

I'm looking forward to it.
> 
> Let's not lose this opportunity.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave