Common Smalltalk VM Summit

stephane ducasse stephane.ducasse at gmail.com
Thu Oct 5 17:52:39 UTC 2006


this sounds really an excellent idea. I hope that forces will be  
joining.

On 5 oct. 06, at 18:13, David Griswold wrote:

> Ok everybody,
>
> Hopefully the right people are listening in so that we can have a real
> dialog between the different Smalltalk implementations.
>
> Basically what I am proposing is that we try to join efforts to  
> support an
> open source high-performance VM that we could all then use however  
> we want.
> No one Smalltalk faction could do this before, because building a
> type-feedback VM from the ground up is just too big a job for a  
> small group
> of volunteers, especially if they didn't have experience with the  
> Self VM,
> on which it is based.  But now we have one that is basically done,  
> with just
> some debugging and tweaking here and there, which is a lot less  
> effort than
> writing a new one.
>
> I'm not proposing that we all give up our different Smalltalk tools,
> libraries, GUIs, etc.  In fact, hopefully this could be done  
> without anyone
> having to commit to tossing their own VM out.  The idea would be to  
> factor
> out a core VM interface, and then each platform could wrap that as  
> necessary
> to make it look the way their libraries expect it to.  Then there  
> would at
> least be the option of plugging in a different VM, and if people  
> like it,
> they could then switch to it completely if they want.
>
> Of course, this requires compromising on all sides, since there are  
> numerous
> small language and VM functionality differences we would have to  
> iron out.
> But even if there is some pain there, the benefit of having a common
> language semantics and a bigger group of people supporting the VM  
> should be
> worth it.  It might even be a path, eventually, to reuniting the  
> Smalltalks.
> For commercial Smalltalks, one big benefit would be the increased  
> comfort
> that customers would have because the VM would be open source, and  
> thus more
> likely to survive in the long term.
>
> I'm not saying that I or Strongtalk would even have to play the  
> leading role
> here.  There are plenty of smart VM people in the Smalltalk  
> community, and
> they are welcome to step up and assert themselves.
>
> We need to look more closely at the various VM and language  
> differences that
> we would have to overcome.  What is everyones feedback on the  
> difficulties
> and benefits of doing this?
>
> -Dave
>
>
>




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