Common Smalltalk VM Summit

[bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk]

Sorry about the delay in responding.

Alex Perez writes:
 > 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?

I've thought about doing an ARM port. In some ways Exupery would
suit an ARM better than the x86, more registers. The only extra
complexity besides porting details would be scheduling instructions.
ARMs tend to be in-order CPUs.

ARMs are a nice complement to the x86. 3 operand, more registers, a
clean RISC instruction set, in-order. Running on both the ARM and the
x86 would definitely cover the portability story. However, about 90%
of the portability work could be done as an x86-64 bit port (they have
different C calling conventions).

 > 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.

The common VM summit has unfortunately been and gone, though you can
read about it on the Strongtalk mailing list, there was a little
discussion on Squeak's vm-dev list too. There's a link to the
Strongtalk mailing list archives above and a link to the vm-dev list
archives below.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev

Bryce