[News] Fwd: Re: Common Smalltalk VM Summit

[Klaus D. Witzel]

Hi list,

looks like there's not the hoped-for response and enthusiasm for defining  
an unofficial Smalltalk-2007 specification as a base for all the  
Smalltalk(-ish) VM's.

But perhaps it's too early to say such (hopefully).

Nevertheless, it may be worth a headline, "Unofficial Smalltalk-2007  
specification?" :)

/Klaus

---- Forwarded Usenet-message ----
From: "Alex Perez" <aperez at alexperez.com>
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.exupery
Subject: Re: Common Smalltalk VM Summit
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 12:00:02 +0100
URL: news://<455AF332.8080200@alexperez.com>

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