Bryce Kampjes <bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Currently I only target x86 on Linux. It shouldn't be hard to extend
> both to other operating systems and also to other CPUs.

Perfect on both counts - that's what I use :-)

>  > For a first step - do you have the obligatory 3 + 4 working?
> Compiling to assembly it can handle an iterative factorial. Compiling
> inside the image is still very limited because of the assembler. That
> is my current project.
Good idea. 

> Once the assembler can handle compiling an iterative factorial the
> next step will be message sends. They are required for the integer
> byte codes anyway, overflows are handled by sending and so is
> non-SmallInteger arithmetic.

I'll tell you one thing that sounds to me like it might be both useful
and relatively easy to improve on - running the simulator. Since it's
actually Slang (no dynamic sends), it's already a subset of the full
Smalltalk problem (project 1.5?), and since it's currently either
compiled externally (clumsy) or interpreted as full Smalltalk
(relatively slow), you might make it more easily useful.

If the simulator was fast enough to comfortably run regular size images,
I guess people would use it more to learn about/debug problem images,
and study the VM. Oh, we need to fix it in the image, too, but Craig's
doing that...

> I don't want to start trying to speed up sends until after
> I've got useful byte code speed ups.
Just curious - why? to partition it more clearly?

> It might be better to think of it as three projects. The first one is
> as small as possible to be easily achievable, compiling individual
> methods to speed up bytecode performance. The second one is larger and
> should be easily achievable on top of the first, a useful general
> purpose dynamic compiler for Squeak. The third is a lot of dreams
> about what computers could be and involves redrawing the abstraction
> boundaries in systems software. I'm currently focusing on the first
> which is why I'm interested in easy uses for the compiler now.
Sounds like you have very clearly planned. Release early, release often
- I'm curious :-)
 
Daniel