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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