[News] Fwd: Re: Common Smalltalk VM Summit

Wed Nov 15 21:59:25 UTC 2006

I completly lost that news and I'd like to
interview someone...perhaps you?
I am away this week but I will be back at Monday night so...if you  
have some throughts please share it with the news mailing list and  
then we can set up a couple of questions for Ingalls too ;)

On 15/nov/06, at 13:09, Klaus D. Witzel wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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