Common Smalltalk VM Summit
J J
azreal1977 at hotmail.com
Fri Oct 6 20:27:18 UTC 2006
>From: "David Griswold" <David.Griswold at acm.org>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers
>list"<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: RE: Common Smalltalk VM Summit
>Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 11:18:27 -0700
>
>A lot of this confusion isn't your fault, it's the fault of the unfortunate
>choice of term "type-feedback," which is historical. It is really "class"
>or "implementation type" feedback, and it is a mechanism *inside* the
>Strongtalk VM that dynamically tracks what instance classes occur at each
>send site, to learn how to inline and optimize those sends.
>
>The Strongtalk "type system" is a *completely* unrelated subsystem, that
>runs outside the VM in Smalltalk. Strongtalk types are not implementation
>or class types, but pure interface types, that have nothing to do with
>classes, so they are not useful for optimization. They are used purely to
>check the code and make it more structured and understandable, and are
>based
>on static analysis, not dynamic analysis.
>
>So Strongtalk has two, unrelated features: a dynamic type(class)-feedback
>VM, and a Smalltalk static type(interface)-checker.
>-Dave
>
Thank you very much for the explaination. This thread sounds a lot more
interesting now. :)
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