[squeak-dev] re: would it be fun to implement Squeak (and SPOON!) on this hardware?

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Mon Dec 23 12:59:02 UTC 2013


On 2013-12-23, at 00:24, Craig Latta <craig at netjam.org> wrote:

>> Why not strip the VM down as far as possible too, and pull in
>> additional things when needed?  Just enough VM to run a minimal
>> Spoon. It doesn't have to be fast; it can pull in speedup methods
>> as needed (or perhaps even swap itself for a fancier VM on the
>> fly???).
> 
>     Sure, that's the plan. I first asked someone to help with that in
> 1998. It's not hard. No one has decided to devote time to it. Now's your
> chance. :)

One thing would be to compile the VM without inlining. Another to remove the non-essential primitives, which have a fallback in image (*). Even more primitives could be made optional if the image had more fallbacks. Or if you knew the image wasn't going to use those primitives, which might be the case in Spoon. Also quite a bit of code is devoted to purely to optimizing - the method cache, at-caches etc.

- Bert -

(*) but don't be surprised if the fallback code suffers from bitrot. It is never executed on regular VMs with all the primitives in place. Having recently implemented a minimal VM I did discover those bugs ;)


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list