Strongtalk VM for Squeak

Ron Teitelbaum Ron at USMedRec.com
Mon Sep 18 18:33:59 UTC 2006


Jecel,

Thanks for your response!

The performance improvements of a Strongtalk VM appear to be quite
substantial.  There are a number of other things that interest me, including
the compiling of code based on what code is used.  It would be difficult,
considering the people involved in the strongtalk project and given Dan's
comments, to dismiss this opportunity with, "been there, done that".  I
assume that the Strongtalk community will develop with or without Squeak,
the real question is should we as a community work closely with strongtalk
so that a strongtalking squeak vm is an option, even if it is not fully
adopted by the community?

I do understand the argument of compatibility vs. performance, but
performance should not be discounted, especially if the gains are
significant, if this community is ready to move into business application
development.  

Ron



> From: Jecel Assumpcao Jr
> Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 2:10 PM
> 
> Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> > If we accepted that the base VM is C++ then couldn't plugins still be
> slang,
> > (or the slang plugins still be supported by the base Strongtalk vm) or
> is
> > this too much for the squeak community to accept?
> 
> Note that when the Squeak project was started there was already an Open
> Source (BSD license) Smalltalk VM written in C++. I am talking about
> Self 4.0 hosting GNU Smalltalk, which at the time outperformed all
> available VMs including the commercial ones. And this work had been done
> by the group from which one of Squeak's creators had come from, so we
> can be sure he was very familiar with it.
> 
> I think it would be true to say that Squeak was started as a reaction
> against what you are suggesting. The goal was portability and not
> performance, though projects such as Ian's Jitter were encouraged. I had
> a very good experience using Jitter 2 back in the Squeak 2.3 days, for
> example, but didn't care enough about performance to keep at it and
> found myself using the regular VM just as often (and exclusively on
> later Squeaks).
> 
> A more radical change to the Squeak VM was Anthony Hannan's VI4 work,
> which gave us better performance and real closures. But though his new
> bytecodes were cleaner, my impression is that he felt the gain wasn't
> enough to justify losing the historical connection to the "blue book"
> design. I always worry about the implementation itself as an educational
> object (and not just the eToys layer) and so like to take these issues
> into consideration. Recent versions of Little Smalltalk, for example,
> are much improved over the original but now they no longer match the
> book and are less valuable as a teaching tool. Anthony later created the
> "closure compiler" which worked with unmodified VMs and my impression
> was that this, unlike what Lex said, actually has been included in
> official Squeak.
> 
> While I am very glad that Strongtalk has finally been open sourced (and
> so has Klein, the "Self written in Self" VM which probably matches
> Squeak's goals better) even if someone does adapt it to run Squeak I
> wouldn't bet on it being officially adopted by the community. I think
> Ian's current work has a far better chance.
> 
> -- Jecel
> 





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