[OT] Sun has released the Strongtalk VM as Open Source.

stephane ducasse stephane.ducasse at gmail.com
Tue Sep 12 17:53:39 UTC 2006


>> I just caught this on the Strongtalk mailing list, and thought  
>> that it may be of
>> interest to some of you. See  http://www.strongtalk.org  for more  
>> info.
>
> This could be the most important thing to happen in the Smalltalk  
> community in years.  The Strongtalk VM was faster than any other  
> when it was written, and I believe it is still comparable to the  
> VisualWorks VM (it would be fun to test).

At ESUG Georg Heeg showed how they were sucessfull to run  
ObjectStudio in VW and this was quite impressive. So Squeak could run  
on VW but the VM is not open-source. So I really hope that there will  
be a living and kicking strongtalk community.

> One could ignore the type system and simply port all of Squeak into  
> Strongtalk (of course there are parts of Strongtalk that are better  
> and should not be lost ;-).  Then, or in the process, if one did a  
> tasteful job of supporting the types optionally (ie a browser  
> switch to show them or not), it would be the first opportunity to  
> have the best of both worlds in Smalltalk -- or anywhere for that  
> matter.

several people are working on pluggable type system in Smalltalk.  
There is at least one smart guys at berne working on that

> The Strongtalk VM is organized as a high-performance interpreter  
> (2-3 times Squeak speed, I believe), and an inlining JIT that  
> achieves roughly 6x Squeak speed.  Gilad reports the following on  
> his Intel Mac:
>
>         Squeak 3.8    345,712,356 bytecodes/sec;  7,855,215 sends/sec
>         Strongtalk  1,805,996,472 bytecodes/sec; 48,075,256 sends/sec
>
> My mind reels at these numbers.  Moreover Robert Griesemer had a  
> design for an even better JIT and, if this became an active  
> project, I bet he would help out.
>
> Strongtalk is set up to support native windows, and it probably  
> makes sense to keep it that way, but this would be a parting of the  
> ways from Squeak's run-anywhere agility. It would be nice to  
> introduce a layer in the UI with a separate bitblt-only  
> implementation to retain extreme portability.
>
> The VM is not simple -- it is a large body of C++ code.  However it  
> was written by smart people and is well-organized (I haven't looked  
> through it carefully).  It probably has some bugs, and it may take  
> some archaeology to get it all to compile with the latest tools.
>
> That said, I think there would be a tremendous reward for doing the  
> work.  The ironman engineering of Strongtalk seems a perfect match  
> for Squeak's cheerful insouciance.
>
>         - Dan
>




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