Squeak 2.4 on Casio E105 observations

Dwight Hughes dwighth at ipa.net
Fri Aug 6 01:31:08 UTC 1999


Serg Koren wrote:
> 
> 1) Hm I'm not familiar with Alan Kay's recognizer.  Any pointers would be
> appreciated.

Do Alt-r in a workspace -- the cursor changes to a dot, which you can
use to draw whatever forms you wish to use to represent letters (it's
trainable, so you could use the Graffiti forms or any other you would
like).

>> Also, has anyone noticed how Dan Ingall's article in the August 1981 byte on
>> the
>> Smalltalk VM implementation talked about "small" VM implementations (i.e.
>> 10's
>> of K bytes rather than the 100's of K bytes of most Squeak VM's)?  I can't
>> beleive that C should produce a VM implemenation that's an order of
>> magnitude
>> larger than an assembly implementation.  Where's the bloat coming from?
>> 
>>                                    -Dean Swan

I would guesstimate that the current VM is probably only about a factor
of two or three larger than a decent assembly language version would be.
The "bloat" really comes from a lot more primitives being added (all the
networking and multimedia stuff for example), along with the
OS-dependent interface code to support it. You can get an idea of what a
1981 vintage VM would contain by comparing it to the Blue Book VM
implementation.
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_imp_toc.html

-- Dwight





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