Animorphic ST (Strongtalk) released!

Dan Ingalls Dan at SqueakLand.org
Tue Jul 16 17:49:18 UTC 2002


Nathanael Schärli <n.schaerli at gmx.net> wrote a while back...

>I have just got an email from Gilad Bracha who announced that Animorphic
>ST is now available to download at:
>
>http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/strongtalk
>
>Animrophic ST (also called Strongtalk) is a high-performance ST
>implementation with a type system that is both optional and incremental.
>It has been developed by a small company in the mid 90s before the
>company got aquired by SUN to work on the Java VM.
>
>Besides the code itself, the webpage also contains the "History" of this
>ST implmentation, which is pretty interesting.

[Yes, I heard about this independently from David G].

This is definitely a landmark piece of work, and it's great to have it finally out in the open.

Ever since talking with Gilad & Co. about it, there has been this little plex in the back of my mind along the lines of "Squeak meets StrongTalk".

The first component in this gestalt is that I think type annotations are useful as documentation, and I have always felt (and often said) that a Smalltalk with optional types would be an ideal computing environment.  It really fills a hole in the metasystem.

The second component is a sort of BOBW (best of both worlds) notion that with the cool aspects of Squeak and its numerous multimedia facilities, together with what is arguably the fastest execution engine going, we could at least have a lot of fun.

The third component has to do with applying the Squeak philosophy to what otherwise appears to me as a daunting project.  The Animorphics VM is (I would suggest) a programming tour de force.  I have always been paralyzed when considering such projects (and this goes for, eg, the SELF compiler, too), by the thought that I would burn out simply dealing with so much complexity all in C or worse (if you can imagine that ;-).  The whole idea behind Squeak (well, not the whole of it, but the implementation approach) was that we could write it in the language we already knew, and it would be easy to understand and test.  I don't see why we couldn't do the same thing for an engine similar to the Animorphics VM (Ian and I have also talked about doing the same kind of thing for Jitter).

Some questions are:

	Would the system benefit from being cast into StrongTalk?
		and how much work would this be?

	Would anyone care if it ran 10 times faster?
		and how much work would this be?

	Would it be fun to do?

Comments?

	- Dan

PS Nathanael:  Could you forward this to Gilad?  I don't have his email addr, but I'd like to hear his comments (which I or you could forward to the list).  Also, David, I'm hoping you will answer with your thoughts.



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