Animorphic ST (Strongtalk) released!
Marcus Denker
marcus at ira.uka.de
Sat Jul 20 10:51:43 UTC 2002
On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 10:14:47AM -0700, Dan Ingalls wrote:
>
> As you know, the Squeak VM is written in Slang, a subset of Smalltalk that can be translated to C. Its virtues are...
>
> It doesn't require learning C if you're a Squeaker
> It can be changed and tested as easily as Smalltalk
> It can be translated to run as fast as C
>
> ...and these are its ONLY virtues. The last item is important for Squeak since the Squeak VM is an interpreter, so running it on itself will only make it slower.
>
Yes. Slang is Evil ;-)
It doesn't require you to learn writing C, but you have to *think* in C if
you want to use it.
> My point is that I'm not recommending do write it in Slang like
> Squeak (an interpreter that you can translate), but to write
> it in Snort, a compiler that can compile itself. It's still the
> Squeak philosophy: write everything in the home language, and do what
> it takes to make it run.
>
Yes, I really like that!
We should try to replace Slang alltogether. Jalapeno simply (?)
dumps all native code to the disk, so you only need a simple "bootloader".
I don't think this is an option for Squeak: We want to be portable, and
requiring a Compiler-Backend for the processor is not as nice as only
the requirement of a C Compiler.
But it should be possible to reuse lots of the Compiler-Framework used
in the Jit-Compiler for a good static Smalltalk-To-C Translator...
and thus we could implement the Interpreter in Smalltalk, not Slang.
(The question is if it is possible to generate code that's fast enough for
a production "interpreter only" system).
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de -- Squeak! http://squeakland.org
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